For Easter 2007 the collector has prepared a few showcases of the children of the Passion...
"THE CHILDREN OF THE PASSION"
The allusion to the future passion and death on the cross is present in many representations of the birth of Christ, such as in Christmas folksongs, especially Spanish and Latin-American ones.
Art history has filled up wonderful pages on the subject, like the Madonna’s of Giovanni Bellini where the Infant rests on his future tomb, or either Maria and the Baby Jesus look, immersed in a serious gaze, at a future full of both suffering and saviour.
In the paintings and sculptures of the Baby Jesus there is an entire iconographic current for the devotion, dating back to the 15th-century, the so-called “Children of the Passion”. They are represented by an infant of only a few years old holding some of the symbols of the passion, like the cross or the nails. Sometimes it has a crown of thorns around his head, expressing pain and looking up in supplication.
A variant is the series of the “Children of the Passion fallen asleep” which represent the Infant fallen asleep, usually on a skull and a cross or with other objects of the Passion. They seem to evoke the words of Saint Alfonso Maria de Liguori: “so the Holy Child was sleeping, but in its sleep it was thinking of all the punishments it had to undergo for the love of us, in its entire life and in death (…)
It was thinking in particular of the scourges, the spines, the disgraces, the agonies and the lonely death that it would finally have to undergo on the cross, and all this whilst sleeping. Jesus offered the Holy Father, to implore our forgiveness and health” (Novena del Santo Natale 33).
In other cases the Infant is awake and transmits a sense of anxiety.
In the collection of the Descalzas Reales of Madrid there is a special model of this series which represents the Infant standing up with its elbow resting on a tree stump around which a snake, symbol of sin, winds its body, while one of the feet rests on a large sphere and one hand holds a smaller globe. The Infant has a lost look, concentrating in meditation.
The iconography of these Children is changed in large part by the sorrowful, antique putti’s. In the antiquarian ardour of the first part of the 16th-century, Agostino Busti, known also as the “Bambaia”, made several of these statues. The two most handsome ones can be found in the collection Borromeo and represent a sad Infant resting on a skull which puts out the torch on earth.
Desiderio da Settiniano however, in his remarkable production of the Children, sculpted the Baby Jesus many times with the crown of thorns in its hands.
