Paso, the Holy Week Float

The paso is designed around an unusual constraint: it has to move through streets that were laid out before it existed, at night, carried by people. In Seville the bearers work underneath, inside the structure, forty or so to a float, shoulders against padded beams, unable to see where they are going. A foreman walks in front and communicates by rapping on the frame, and the team lifts, walks, halts and lowers to those signals. Corners in the old quarters are taken in a series of tiny shuffling steps. The effect from the street is that a large gilded object carrying life-sized figures glides forward with no visible means of propulsion, and that effect is the entire craft.

Malaga does it differently, with far larger tronos carried on external beams by teams running into the hundreds, and other cities use wheels or shorter routes. What is constant is the scale of the undertaking. A brotherhood may be on the street for eight or twelve hours, moving from its own church to the cathedral and back on a route fixed and timetabled by the city, threading between other brotherhoods doing the same thing. The music is a band behind the float, and in Andalusia the procession can be stopped by a saeta, a single unaccompanied voice from a balcony, at which everything halts until the singer has finished.

The images are not generic devotional statuary. They were carved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the leading sculptors of the Spanish Baroque, among them Juan Martinez Montanes and Juan de Mesa in Seville, Gregorio Fernandez in Valladolid and Pedro de Mena in Granada and Malaga, and they were made with a specific viewing condition in mind. Polychrome finish, glass eyes, real hair, articulated joints and costume were used to close the distance between a wooden figure and a person, because the Counter-Reformation had committed the Catholic Church to the image as a means of moving a congregation at exactly the moment reformers elsewhere were removing images from churches altogether.

The bodies that own and process them are lay. A cofradia or hermandad is a brotherhood with its own statutes, membership, finances, rehearsal schedule and long institutional memory, in some cases running back five centuries. It owns the images, the silver, the embroidery and the storage, elects its officers, and negotiates its route with the city and with the cathedral. Membership can be hereditary in practice, and the internal politics are real. That structure is why the processions survived changes of regime, anticlerical periods and the Civil War, in which some images were destroyed and were subsequently recarved. It is also why the observance is simultaneously a devotion, a civic institution and, in Seville and Malaga, a very large annual economy.