The Ivory Figures of the Good Shepherd

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Goa and presumably other places in the Portuguese Estado da Índia there was a group of objects aside from Madonnas and crucifixes manufactured in especially high numbers and probably in series. These were ivory sculptures of a shepherd boy sitting on a steep, nearly tower-like mountainous formation—an image now designated as the Good Shepherd (figs. 173–177). These figures have a very specific yet not easily decipherable iconography. As a rule, the boy is clothed in a wool cloak and more often than not sits on a heart that grows out of a stone or mountain; he holds a lamb on his lap or shoulder, and sometimes a shepherd's crook in his hand. Often, one of his arms rests on a gourd. Usually, the boy's legs are crossed and his head leans a bit to the side against his open right hand. The mountain on which he poses is full of sheep and other, wild, animals that comingle peacefully. Often we see Saint Mary Magdalene lying and reading in a cave at the sculpture's bottom. Water also generally pours out from a spring and flows from the top of the rocky outcropping onto the work's lower levels