Verdadero Retrato del Venerable Padre Fray Francisco Solano Predicador Apostolico de las Indias del Piru.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An engraved devotional portrait, printed on vellum, of Spanish Franciscan missionary and later Saint, Francisco Solano (1549-1610). He is depicted here holding a crucifix and accompanied by two Indigenous Peruvian figures, representing his missionary work in Tucumán, Lima and Trujillo – all part of the then colonial Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru – which is a traditional part of his iconography. Other depictions in print and paintings show him playing the violin, accompanied by a bull he is said to have tamed as a pet, or juxtaposed alongside St Francis of Assisi, his spiritual predecessor (Camere, p.218). While his image does appear in print and in paint in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have not found any other examples of his likeness used in small, private devotional talismans like this one. Solano was born near Cordova in Spain, in 1549 and entered the Franciscan order at the age of twenty. Following twenty years of teaching and instruction at the local seminary, and having gained a reputation for his healing powers – particularly during a local outbreak of bubonic plague - in 1589 at the age of forty Solano made the long journey to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. He travelled to Peru via Cartagena, after a three-month sea voyage, then on to Panama, Lima and then 3000km to arrive in Tucumán, now in northern Argentina, in 1590. The first stage of his journey to Cartagena was made on a slave ship which was wrecked in a storm and sank, but suffered no losse

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