Saint Anne Teaching the Virgin

The mother in one of her most sublime acts: teaching. Saint Anne, seated in a chair with a scrolled back, teaches the child Virgin to read — the most widespread subject of Saint Anne's cult in colonial Brazil, and one that best displays the flesh tones and estofado work of Bahian sculpture.

Estofado is the technique that gives these robes their gold: the whole figure was gilded and then painted over; the paint was afterwards scraped away with a stylus, and the gold appeared beneath, drawn into flowers and foliage. Every pattern was made by hand, and it is by them that the workshops of a region are told apart.

Saint Anne Teaching is, besides, an image of two bodies — the matron and the child — and so demanded of the carver what a single standing figure does not: a conversation, resolved in the gesture of the hands over the book.