MUSEO DIOCESANO DE ARTE JESUÍTICO

This museum of religious art occupies a magnificent colonnaded building with thick adobe walls and a beautiful architectural perspective. It is the oldest 17th century building still in use in Paraguay. It belongs to the Jesuits, who returned to San Ignacio in 1933 (after their expulsion in 1767). Inside what was once the Jesuit College there is a small chapel, with the altarpiece that was in the old church, one of the most imposing in the area, which collapsed in 1921. The museum is made up of four rooms, where about thirty polychrome sculptures in cedar wood are exhibited according to religious themes (Creation, Redemption, the history of Christ in the Church, and finally the Society of Jesus). These statues of Christ, of the Immaculate Conception, of archangels and saints (Francis of Assisi, Paul, Ignatius of Loyola...), were saved when the building collapsed, and preciously kept by the inhabitants who later returned them to the religious. These sculptures from the 17th and 18th centuries are in the Hispano-Guarani Baroque style and transition from the Baroque. Carlos Bedoya, the museum's curator, will be able to show you the differences, and make you understand the inestimable value, from a historical and cultural point of view, of these pieces carved in the middle of the jungle by the Guarani. Note the delicacy of this work, the delicate details of these magnificent images, of a value similar to those of the Museum of Santa Maria de Fé.