Saint Agnes
Ca. 1665. Oil on canvas.Not on display
Judging by its vibrant, luminous dabs of paint, its loose and violent brushstrokes, and the tension in their positions, this work – along with Saint Anthony Abbot (P007636) and two other paintings, Saint Catherine and Saint Augustine, in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano – had been attributed to Valdés Leal, a painter from Seville, up until 1944 when Angulo Íñiguez attributed them to Francisco Rizi after noticing Ceán Bermúdez’s remarks on the great resemblance between the paintings of Valdés and Rizi. He also acknowledged that Elías Tormo had already doubted its authorship in 1927, either by Francisco Herrera the Younger or by Rizi.
Its scintillating style and the models employed by the artist – which recall the paintings that used to belong to the convent de franciscanas menores de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Madrid, now in the Museo del Prado – suggest that their chronology shares similarities with that of his late production period, around 1665. Angulo already implied that, judging by their elongated proportions, they could have originated from the side panels of a small altarpiece or, had they been used as pedestal decorations, it must have been a large-scale one. The fact that one of the four abovementioned saints depicts Saint Augustine might suggest that the altarpiece that they came from was located in a convent church of the Augustinian order. All in all, it is worth recalling that, as Palomino and Ceán quoted, among Rizi’s paintings, ‘the painting of Saint Catherine and the others that are found on the altarpiece’ in the Augustinian church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid.
In 1917, they all belonged to José Lázaro Galdiano’s collection. Conversely, only those depicting Saint Catherine and Saint Augustine entered this museum in 1950, yet the whereabouts of the two other paintings have remained unknown since that date. Their recovery and subsequent purchase by the Museo del Prado have made it possible to bring together the fragments of a formerly dispersed group of works.
Museo del Prado, Un mecenas póstumo: el legado Villaescusa. Adquisiciones 1992-1993, Madrid, Museo del Prado, 1993, p.82-84
