Spanish Baroque Sculpture in the Dirigisme of the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

The production of sacred images in wood in the Spain of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not so much a religious phenomenon as a socialization process unique to Modern Europe. It involved the implementation of rhetorical devices announced by Aristotle and defined by later philosophical movements, for educational purposes, generating an unusual imaginary language which had profound repercussions in almost every area of everyday life. Thus, these new objects, created in accordance with the doctrines issued by Trent, played an important role in shaping the motives and socialization spaces of the Baroque age, through the transformation of towns and villages, which now needed to acquire infrastructures and new scenarios in which to launch the newly theorized persuasive mechanisms.