The origin of the motif of our Lady of Mercy is uncertain, but by the fifteenth century it had become popular, especially in Catalonia where this sculpture was probably made. A benignly smiling and rosy cheeked Virgin Mary stretches out her arms to shelter an assembly of people under her richly decorated cloak, supported by Saints Peter and Paul. The Virgin and her saintly assistants are many times larger than those she draws around her, allowing her to protect a goodly number; but her stature also adds to the image’s evocation of a sheltering presence.

In some versions of the motif, Mary offers protection to particular groups (members of a religious community, for example), but here she gathers something of a cross-section of society. The variety of headgear signals the variety of persons and ranks under her protection—there is a papal tiara, a cardinal’s hat, a mitre, and a crown, as well as fashionable turbans, caps, and wimples for male and female laity. And at the right-hand edge of the group is a male of African descent, kneeling and looking upwards expectantly.

Should we be surprised by his presence—as many of the first readers of the Book of Acts might have been surprised by the presence of the Ethiopian eunuch amongst the first gentiles to accept the gospel? In some ways the appearance of this Black man is a reflection of the artist’s social reality—the first enslaved Africans had been brought to Europe only some seventy-five years before this sculpture was fashioned. Spain in particular had a sizeable Black population in the early sixteenth century, estimated to be as much as 10% in major centres such as Seville.

And yet such social reality—as later history would prove—was never sufficient, by itself, to ensure the presence of Black people (enslaved or otherwise) under the protecting wings of the Virgin or ‘Mother Church’. As Martin Luther King, Jr would say some 450 years after this object was made: ‘11 o’clock on a Sunday morning is America’s most segregated hour’.

The presence of this single Black person under the unsegregated cape of salvation, like the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, is a sign of the gospel’s reaching to the very ends of the earth—even if the church has found it hard in practice to accept the universalism of Christ’s promise.