wonder-lijk 5

Although it has all the aspects of a wooden Colonial Christ... 

the figure has been discovered recently to be made actually as if modeled like a very fine ceramic, with porcelain quality, from a mixture of very fine highly plastic mud and grass that correspond to the plants found on the shores of the Guadalajara river until present. 

There are no precedents of this same quality of porcelain work in all the art craft of the Americas. It represents a singularity never repeated again either in the Pre-Hispanic or the Colonial religious art of not only Colombia but any other place in the entire Andean region of South America.

The original color of the figure is of mysterious origin. 

Since it resembles human skin, and it is possible that it was protected subsequently with layers of varnish for religious figures used in colonial times by artisans hired to either repair or protect the figure, although there are no records of such repairs in the church archives.

The Lord of Miracles of Guadalajara of Buga has at present the size of a short adult man (1,3m). It has a distinctive look that is not really European, due to the relative dark color of his skin, but definitively of a man of middle east, resembling a lot the depictions of Christ from the Holy Mandylion and Keramion, or the Christ Pantocrator (Mount Sinai monastery).

On 5 October 2006... 

a team of specialists used four different complementary technologies to analyze the artifact: X rays, ultraviolet rays, pigment, and stratigraphic analysis. The analyses of the image certified its incredibly well preserved condition after several centuries. 

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