Saint Christopher

Saint Christopher by Simón Pereyns shows the saint striding through a shallow river with the Christ Child on his shoulder. The scene follows the medieval legend recounted in The Golden Legend: Christopher, a giant of great strength, vowed to serve the greatest king and carried travellers across a dangerous river. One day a small child asked to be carried, and the child grew heavier with each step, until Christopher understood that he bore the Creator of the world. Pereyns captures that moment of strain without theatrics. The saint grips a tall staff whose top is crowned with a palm frond, a reference to the miracle in which the staff, planted in the ground, flowered and bore fruit as a sign of his faith. His orange cloak falls over a deep blue tunic, and his bare legs disappear into the water, so the physical effort of the crossing is clear. The child, in a pale red garment, leans against his head and gestures toward the far bank, where travellers and a robed figure appear. This gesture gives the picture its direction, pulling the viewer's eye across the river toward the goal of the journey. Fish swim among the rocks at the lower edge, which places the saint in a living, natural world rather than an abstract space. The landscape is soft and open, with a hill on the left and a tree-lined shore beyond. Biografías y Vidas notes that Pereyns's landscape gives the saint a human dimension, avoiding the aggressive, warlike presentation common in the period, when Christopher was often shown as a fierce giant. The painting also draws on Flemish models: the same source links Pereyns to the engravings of Sadeler and to paintings by Maerten de Vos, which he adapted for the colonial setting. The figure reads as a porter carrying a child across a difficult river, a model of faithful, humble service. Simón Pereyns was a Flemish painter born in Antwerp around 1530. He trained in Flanders and travelled in his twenties, moving to Lisbon in 1558 and then to Toledo and Madrid, where the court of Philip II was based. In 1566 he came to New Spain as part of the entourage of the Marqués de Falces, the new viceroy, and his first commission was battle scenes for the viceregal palace. He married in Mexico in 1567 and remained there for the rest of his life, so he became one of the most important painters working in the colony in the late sixteenth century. His most important surviving work is the ten-panel altarpiece of the Franciscan convent at Huejotzingo, Puebla, completed in 1586 with the sculptor Andrés de la Concha, which shows the influence of Dürer and the Flemish prints that Pereyns knew. Most of his output has been lost, and he is known for a mannerist style of refinement and learning. His career was marked by an Inquisition trial in the 1560s, during which he was charged with heresy. Later legend links him to the Virgin of Forgiveness (Virgen del Perdón), which he is said to have painted to win his release. He died in Mexico City around 1589, though some sources give a later date.