ABOUT THE WORK

A“mystery” santo, massive and ancient, depicting a kneeling woman, with long tresses and a covered urn. She holds one hand to her heart, the other arm outstretched. With no other iconographic clues to guide us, her identity is best left to conjecture. The long hair (in this case, reaching almost to her knees) and the covered urn point us to the biblical stories that have come to be associated with Mary of Magdala. In the four canonical gospels, Mary is a follower who travelled with Jesus as an apostle. She was the first one to whom he appeared at his resurrection. Bible scholars say that Mary of Magdala has often been confused with two other biblical characters. The first was the adulteress Jesus saved from being stoned to death. The second, the sinner who washed his feet with her tears, dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume. Jesus thanked her for her faith, forgave her sins and asked her to save the costly fragrance so that one day, she could use it to anoint his corpse. In popular imagination, these two other repentant sinners have been combined in the persona of Mary Magdalene. In Catholic art, she is often depicted with both the long tresses and the perfume bottle. The santo from the Legarda collection has her face turning slightly facing away from the viewer. This feature, as well as the kneeling position, leads to the possibility that the santo may have been a part of a bigger tableaux depicting the burial of Christ. The key figures of such a tableaux would have been the Mater Dolorosa, the corpus of the dead Christ, Saint John, Joseph of Arimathea and other mourners. The natural wear and erosion on the hardwood piece also leads us to imagine that the tableaux may have been located in the outside of the church where it could be viewed by more people, an important instrument for catechesis. The loss of collection notes deprives us of the chance to learn about the exact church of origin of this piece. A further point of interest is that the santos’s nose has been, quite clearly, hacked off. Again, lore and conjecture lead us to the romance of the Philippine Revolution, and the repudiation of the Katipuneros of all things Hispanic and aquiline. Of all the treasures in the Legarda collection, this piece is the most enigmatic. - by Floy Quintos