In one of the side altarpieces, initially with no connection whatsoever to the iconographic cycle about the Apocalypse that Andrés García Ibáñez has created for the Sanctuary of Saliente de Albox, there are three paintings dedicated to the blessed Juan Ibáñez (Fondón, 1878-Tahal, 1936), a priest who became archpriest of Albox from 1921 and who was very popular. One of them is explicitly realistic: four armed militiamen are about to take the life of the clergyman in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.
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For its creation, García Ibáñez extensively researched the life and work of the blessed, especially the time he lived in Albox. Additionally, he went to the exact place where he was killed at night and took photographs to capture the light. “At the feet of the blessed,” he explains during a visit to the Sanctuary before its inauguration on September 6, “you can see the mouth of a well, now sealed, where he was thrown along with other victims. According to some locals, screams were heard coming from inside the well for days, because some of the murdered did not die instantly. The bodies fell through the hole, one on top of another, and they were covered with shovelfuls of quicklime.”
After the July 1936 coup d’état, he was arrested and taken to the prison of the Adoratrices in Almería where, according to witnesses, he suffered cruel tortures. Finally, he was shot on September 13, 1936, in the quicklime pit of Cantavieja, in the Almerian town of Tahal, near the Tabernas desert. He was beatified by Pope Francis in March 2017 and since then, his mortal remains have been venerated as relics with great devotion in the parish church of the Conception of Albox.
It is not the first time that Andrés García Ibáñez has focused on the Christian martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. In total, nearly 7,000 clerics, both secular and regular clergy, were killed by Republican militiamen in the early days of the conflict. In 1993, a Diocesan Commission commissioned García Ibáñez to create a spectacular 400×275 cm canvas of the two bishops and seven religious murdered in Almería at the beginning of the Civil War, a canvas that presided over the beatification ceremony carried out by John Paul II in October of that year. According to specialist Juan Manuel Martín Robles, “alongside the obvious Velázquez influences, notable Goyaesque echoes are observed, both in the individual treatment that Ibáñez gives to each of the martyrs, creating, based on the portraits provided by the Commission, a studied psychological portrait of the nine protagonists.” Today it can be seen in a chapel of the Cathedral of Guadix and a version of it, also with a neutral background but varying the clerics’ garments, in that of Almería.
Additionally, in the sacristy of the Sanctuary hangs the painting titled The Delivery of the Virgin of Saliente to the chief of the Albox militias, from 1997, inspired by the historical moment when the then chaplain of the Sanctuary hands over the image of La Pequeñica to the then secretary general of the PSOE of Albox, so that he would safeguard the sacred statue.
Finally, on the occasion of the beatification, on March 11, 2001, of the two nuns martyred in September 1936 in Buñol (Valencia), he painted portraits of the blessed Sister Josefa Ruano García, native of Berja (Almería), and Sister Dolores Puig Bonany, born in Berga (Barcelona).
However, in the words of historian Javier García-Luengo, these three paintings placed in the Sanctuary are very significant and “innovative, as they depict a recently beatified figure and therefore with little or no iconographic tradition.”
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The result, García-Luengo continues, “owes much to Spanish Baroque painting, without detracting from other references. In fact, the composition, the strong chiaroscuro, and the muted colors are not alien to Goya’s Disasters of War, even for their stark realism, where the psychology of the characters stands out, and it reminds us of Zuloaga, who knew how to approach pictorial renewal based on the heritage of the Golden Age, just like Andrés García Ibáñez.”
A book of war
In the preliminary study that Patxi Lanceros writes for his edition of Apocalypse or Book of Revelation (Abada Editores, 2018), the philosopher defines the complex biblical work as “a book of war”. He then adds: “It is also, or intends to be, a book of justice. And even of Justice with a capital J. And perhaps it is both because it is a book of power: and of conflict, which is never entirely separate nor entirely alien to power.”
A book of power, then: “Or a book in which authentic power, the one inseparable from justice and sometimes hostile to law and right, is legitimized, exposed, and imposed. A power, that power, that plays, that decides over the world and history. And condemns them.”
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And indeed, the text, probably written at the end of the 1st century AD by a cultured and prepared Christian who was likely exiled as a reflection of the repressive and dispersal policy imposed by the Romans, reflects the feeling of resistance of Christianity against what the early communities defined as “the second great persecution,” carried out by Emperor Domitian.
And it is therefore not surprising that Andrés García Ibáñez, at the direction of the Diocese of Almería, dedicates the three paintings of the Epistle Altarpiece to the blessed Juan Ibáñez. Because perhaps they are not so unrelated to the complete Apocalypse cycle.
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