The story of the finding
As the story is told, three fishermen — João Alves, Domingos Garcia, and Felipe Pedroso — were struggling to catch anything on the Paraíba River near Guaratinguetá when their nets pulled up the headless body of a small clay statue, followed shortly after by its blackened head. The two pieces fit together perfectly. Devotees hold that the abundant catch that followed was the image's first miracle, and two further wonders — candles relighting themselves during a rosary, and a slave's shackles opening on their own after he prayed before the image — became fixed parts of the devotional tradition over the following century.
The statue passed through the hands of the fishermen's families for years before it became a shared object of parish devotion. It was crowned officially in 1904, wearing a crown donated two decades earlier by Princess Isabel.
What is known about the object itself
The statue is about 40 centimeters tall and made of fired clay. Conservators and art historians who examined it — including specialists at the Museum of Art of São Paulo, after it was shattered in a 1978 attack and later reconstructed by the restorer Maria Helena Chartuni — dated its style and materials to 17th-century Bahia, attributing it to a sculptor trained in the workshop of the Benedictine friar Agostinho da Piedade. Its original painted finish, if it ever had one, did not survive the years the statue apparently spent submerged in the river.