Among the great figures of Spanish painting, Juan Bautista Maíno (Pastrana, 1581-Madrid, 1649) is also one of the least well known. Although Lope de Vega, Francisco Pacheco, Jusepe Martínez and Antonio Palomino expressed great admiration for Maíno as both a man and a painter he has not until now been the subject of a major study. In addition, the fact that he entered the Dominican Order in 1613 relegated his artistic activities to a secondary plane, as a result of which his known oeuvre only comprises around 40 works.

Despite being drawing master to the future Philip IV, who always respected and paid attention to Maíno’s artistic judgements, concrete biographical details have been so scarce that the precise place and date of his birth in Spain were not known until 1958.

It is now known that the artist was born in the town of Pastrana in the area of Spain known as the Alcarria. Maíno was the son of a Milanese silk merchant of the same name and of Ana de Figueredo from Lisbon. He spent his teenage years in Madrid and went to Italy at a date that is still not known but must have been around the end of the 16th century. There he received his artistic training within the context of the two major trends that prevailed in Rome around 1600: Caravaggio’s revolutionary naturalism and the revision of Italian classicism undertaken by Annibale Carracci and the Bolognese school. Maíno experienced and assimilated this new combination of manners and styles at first hand, as is evident in his painting, which is characterised by a vigorous, descriptive line and monumental, sculptural figures that are defined through intense, contrasting light and bright, saturated colours with a wide range of yellows, ochres, cobalt blues and vermilions. Maíno painted on a range of supports and in different dimensions and was particularly notable as a portraitist as well as a landscape painter, a genre in which he left a number of compositions that combine a classicising aesthetic with a minutely detailed, almost botanical focus close to the style of the Flemish landscape painters.