Telegraph e-paper

Who was the shepherdess in a wide-brimmed hat?

christopher howse

One day last week I asked myself : “Who’s this, then?” But I had no satisfactory answer. It was in the church of St Peter and St Ildephonsus in the small cathedral city of Zamora, where the corner of Portugal digs into Castile.

It’s a fine church, with a double sanctuary – above the altar vertically is another altar before the tombs of St Ildephonsus and St Atilanus.

But my eye was caught by a lightly coloured full-size sculpture under a Gothic arch at one side. It looked 18th-century and was of a shepherdess in a straw hat, with a crook and three or four friendly sheep. She had an infant in her lap.

There is still something charming about a sculpted shepherdess. As Chesterton said, in his collection of essays from 1901 (which defended such things as penny dreadfuls, skeletons and patriotism): “Stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess.”

Could this sculpture in Zamora be St Agnes? On her feast day two lambs are presented to the Pope in Rome, from the wool of which are woven the palliums presented by him to metropolitan or primatial bishops, as seen round the shoulders of St Apollinaris (surrounded by sheep) in the 6th-century mosaic in his church at Classe, Ravenna. But why, apart from an implicit love for the Child Jesus, should St Agnes be shown with an infant?

No one I asked, after leaving to catch my train, knew. Then I stumbled across the fairly obscure figure of Fray Isidoro de Sevilla (1662-1750), a long-lived Franciscan. He did come from Seville, but his name in religion was taken from the great St Isidore of Seville, the 7th-century polymath.

Fray Isidoro worked among the poor and on June 24 1703 preached with much success in the gardens of the Alameda de Hércules in Seville. That night in the nearby church of St Giles, he was taken by the idea of representing the Virgin Mary as a shepherdess and went off next day to visit the painter Alonso Miguel de Tovar. He asked for a picture of Mary sitting on a rock, roses in one hand, the other resting on a sheep, one of her flock. Another sheep, threatened by a wolf, was to be saved by reciting the Hail Mary, at which, to complicate matters, St Michael the Archangel would come down from heaven to deal with the wolf.

Anyway, a fraternity of the Flock of Mary was started by Fray Isidoro, who got Francisco Ruiz Gijón, quite a baroque sculptor, to make a polychrome statue of the Virgin Mary as La Divina Pastora. In English this is usually translated as Mother of the Good Shepherd.

Anomalies needed ironing out. Fray Isidoro had not asked for the Child Jesus to be represented, but it was no use painting Mary’s Son as the Lamb of God amid a flock. So an infant is often depicted, as at Zamora, sometimes in a little fleecy coat, like his cousin St John the Baptist in camel hair.

The devotion went from strength to strength. Each January 14, in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, a statue of the Divina Pastora is carried through the streets followed by two or three million people. Each December 12, villagers of Casarabonela in Andalusia rival the Guy Fawkes tar-barrels of Lewes with flaming pitch-soaked baskets on poles for a night procession of their own image of the Divina Pastora.

She was taken as patron by Peregrina Mogas Fontcuberta (1827-86), who founded the Franciscan Missionaries of the Mother of the Divine Shepherd, which schooled the poor. She was beatified in 1996. Schools in Spain inspired by her have the name Divina Pastora. Even a mutual insurance company bears it.

I’d noticed none of this until my curiosity was piqued last week in Zamora.

Obituaries

en-gb

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/282273849752231

Daily Telegraph