Attributed to José Dias dos Santos Portuguese, Aveiro, first half of the 18th century

Portuguese private collection.

This delicate representation of the sleeping Infant Christ, his head resting on a skull in the tradition of memento mori, is part of the exuberant terracotta corpus known as Menino Dormindo sobre a Morte (Sleeping Child with skull [of Golgotha]). This prefiguration of Christ's sacrifice is one of Aveiro's most original and popular productions.

The small town south of Porto became famous in the 17th and 18th centuries for the production of barristas, terracotta statuettes for private devotion. One of the most famous barristas, along with Bartolomeu Gaspar and Joaquim Marques dos Santos, was José Dias dos Santos, a member of the brotherhood of Mercy, who was active in Aveiro from the last quarter of the 17th century and during the first third of the 18th century. A comparable work by dos Santos, signed and dated «Julho 26 167…», is in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon (inv. 100 Esc), another, unsigned, is in the Fernando de Castro collection, Porto, and yet another was presented at TEFAF, Maastricht, in 2018, by the Blumka gallery.

The exuberance of the furniture on this terracotta group, as well as the richness of the polychromy (estofado) and gilding, place it among the finest examples of this particular type.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. A. Rebocho Christo, « Barristas aveirenses, séculos XVII – XVIII », in Cadernos de Cutlura : História & Património de Aveiro, Aveiro, 2021, pp. 6-23 ;

I. Amorim, “A cerâmica de Aveiro no século XVIII: das olarias à fábrica de «louça fina» », in Revista da Faculdade de Letras: História, Porto, vol. 13, 1996, pp. 403-422.