The altarpiece that presides over the presbytery of the current parish of St. Mary Magdalene, a former Dominican convent of San Pablo el Real, can be conceptualized, today, as the greatest alterpiece company in Seville during the first third of the eighteenth century. With over 160 square meters, it should be considered the second biggest in the city of the Giralda, after the imposing altarpiece of the Holy Cathedral. We must lament the almost complete lack of documentary sources which inform us about their construction process. If we consider that the works of the temple were virtually finalized by 1709 and its consecration took place on October 22, 1724, presumably the estimated start and first development of its realization took place between these dates, as far as its assembly phase and size are concerned. The gilding and polychrome was undertaken, surely two or three decades later. In the trace of the altarpiece and execution of its sculptures Pedro Duque Cornejo may have intervened, noticing several hands in the shaping of its figurative program, which is a celebration of the Order of Preachers through its most representative saints, but reserving the central attic area for the high relief of the Conversion of St. Paul. The effigy of St. Mary Magdalene sculpted by Felipe Malo de Molina in 1707 occupies since the mid-nineteenth century the main niche of the altarpiece, while in the former manifesting of the second body a valuable anonymous sculpture of San Pablo, from the early seventeenth century, lies.
Several Baroque altarpieces, articulated by Solomonic columns and built in the early eighteenth century, furnish the inside of the sacred grounds. The most important is the one Cristobal de Guadix hired in 1707 by the Venerable Third Order of St. Dominic to chair his chapel at the head of the nave of the Epistle, where now the titular images of the brotherhood of Calvary are exhibited.
Perhaps this same assembler intervened in some of the smaller altarpieces of modest size distributed about the cross, for those that currently occupy the sculptures of the Nazarene of Fatigas and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The Virgin of Amparo of the Crucified -old Confalón- also alludes to Guadix characters, but has more slender, petite and elegant proportions than usual in its ornamental repertoire.
The form of the altarpiece of stipes, so widespread in the Seville assemblages from the second decade of the eighteenth century, is represented on the altars of St. Rita of Cascia and the Assumption.
Finally, and responding to a clearly neoclassical nineteenth century chronology, we cite the current altarpiece of the Virgen del Rosario and the sacramental chapel, the latter concluded by Miguel Albin in 1817.
