For the first time in France, an exhibition is devoted entirely to 17th-century Spanish sculpture. Until 25 January 2027 the Louvre presents in the Hall Napoléon Sculpter la couleur, twenty-three masterpieces in polychrome wood and terracotta lent exclusively by the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid. The exhibition sits alongside the major monographic show on Francisco de Zurbarán, in the same spaces and with a shared design by Nathalie Crinière that creates constant echoes between painting and sculpture. The meeting point is a canvas by Zurbarán, the Holy Face, also on loan from Valladolid, which introduces both exhibitions. The image of Christ's face imprinted on Veronica's veil sums up the challenge shared by Spanish painters and sculptors of the time: to render with the utmost realism the irruption of the divine into everyday reality. The first room is dominated by the Camino del Calvario, a complete processional paso made by Gregorio Fernández with Pedro de la Cuadra around 1614-1615. Five life-size figures, more than six metres wide, that carried the episodes of the Passion through the streets of Valladolid, then capital of the kingdom, during Holy Week. Displayed at eye level, they give visitors the emotional immersion they were meant to arouse in the faithful. The exhibition continues by theme. The cult of relics and saints, revived after the Council of Trent and by the 1622 canonisations of Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola. The imágenes de vestir, statues dressed in real garments, sometimes more costly than the sculpture itself. The bodies of the Passion, rendered with an almost shocking naturalism through a variety of materials: in Fernández's Cristo de la Luz (1633) glass, cork, ivory and horn give reality to wounds and blood, while in Pedro de Mena's Ecce Homo (around 1679) glass eyes heighten the pain. Then private devotion, with Esteban de Rueda's tender Christ Child asleep on a skull and the alhajas de escultura, the terracotta "sculpture jewels" with which Luisa Roldán, one of the few women sculptors of her time, won over the court in Madrid. The sequence closes with the Immaculate Conception, an emblematic subject of Spanish art long before the Church proclaimed the dogma in 1854, here in Pedro de Mena's version of 1680, recently restored. Alongside them are Alonso Cano's Saint John the Baptist (1634), by an artist best known as a painter who painted his own sculptures, and works by Juan de Mesa, José de Mora and Pedro Roldán, representing the great schools of Castile and Andalusia.
