The images are not generic devotional statuary. They were carved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the leading sculptors of the Spanish Baroque, among them Juan Martinez Montanes and Juan de Mesa in Seville, Gregorio Fernandez in Valladolid and Pedro de Mena in Granada and Malaga, and they were made with a specific viewing condition in mind. Polychrome finish, glass eyes, real hair, articulated joints and costume were used to close the distance between a wooden figure and a person, because the Counter-Reformation had committed the Catholic Church to the image as a means of moving a congregation at exactly the moment reformers elsewhere were removing images from churches altogether.
The bodies that own and process them are lay. A cofradia or hermandad is a brotherhood with its own statutes, membership, finances, rehearsal schedule and long institutional memory, in some cases running back five centuries. It owns the images, the silver, the embroidery and the storage, elects its officers, and negotiates its route with the city and with the cathedral. Membership can be hereditary in practice, and the internal politics are real. That structure is why the processions survived changes of regime, anticlerical periods and the Civil War, in which some images were destroyed and were subsequently recarved. It is also why the observance is simultaneously a devotion, a civic institution and, in Seville and Malaga, a very large annual economy.