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A childhood scene located on a terrace beside a garden. Three elegantly clothed boys play with a cat. The academic drawing in the background, along with the portfolio and brush belonging to one of the boys, gave this work its name, as though it were an artistic study. This work belongs to a series of scenes related to education that sought to show the Enlightenment´s pedagogical ideas, which relat
On 14 February 1612 Juan Bautista Maíno signed the contract to execute the paintings for the monastery church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo. Maíno agreed to a period of eight months to make the paintings, which had to portray the scenes and episodes specified by the prior of the monastery. Despite the agreement reached in the contract, the paintings were not completed until De
Born in Flanders, Livio Mehus moved to Milan at a young age and is thus often considered an artist of the Italian school. He is recorded in Rome at the age of fourteen and later in Florence, Lucca and around Genoa. He also worked successively in Piamonte and Lombardy. There is ample documentation of his activity as a painter of frescoes and oils, an expert on northern Italian painting and a restor
A domestic scene set in classical antiquity. An old man and a youth recline on divans while an attractive young woman plays music on a double flute. Both the clothing and the setting suggest the Greek world, and the motives and clothing are rigorously faithful to archeological discoveries made in the mid nineteenth century. Despite being Dutch by birth, Sir Lawrence Alma cultivated an eclectic per
Mounted on a white steed and flanked by an angel bearing a flag, Saint James gallops over a multitude of fallen Moors and horses. The battle scene occupies a rocky landscape in the middle ground. This canvas is a sketch for the elliptical dome at the entrance to the Royal Palace’s chapel and was painted by Giaquinto between 1756 and 1757. The canvas and its corresponding fresco are clearly derived
Fearing she was a victim of infidelity, Procris followed her beloved Cephalus to a clearing in the woods, where he was resting during a hunting expedition. The young woman´s jealousy led her to her death when Cephalus mistook her for wild game and shot her with an arrow. Rubens chose to depict that story from Ovid´s Metamorphoses in this preparatory sketch for a painting intended to decorate the T
Documents at Palencia Cathedral cast light on this Crucifixion’s original location -the central row of the main altarpiece at that cathedral- and its author: Juan de Flandes (doc. 1496-1519). They also offer information about this panel between 1509, when that Flemish painter was commissioned to paint it, and 1944, when the Cathedral management sold it. Those same documents indicate that Palencia
Depictions of painting galleries became popular in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 17th century. The exhibition of paintings and other artistic or natural objects was originally a way of manifesting the high social standing of an eminently bourgeois class with a strong desire to ennoble itself. In many cases, the paintings did not rigorously reflect the client’s collection, but served inst
While it is first listed in 1666 at the Alcázar, where it hung alongside Ribera’s Fable of Bacchus or Teoxenia (of which only three fragments have survived: two at the Museo del Prado and one in a private collection), this work’s subject and dimensions suggest it may originally have been commissioned for the Buen Retiro Palace. Along with Finoglia’s Triumph of Bacchus (P7309), Poussin’s Sac
This panel depicts a miracle of Saint Anthony: the conversion of a heretic when he realised that a hungry mule refrained from eating a basket of barley with a consecrated Host on it. Sculpture is used to characterise the different buildings in the urban setting in which the episode takes place, with saints on churches and kings on the town hall.
A dark background and a gray table are the setting for this painting’s only motive: a merino lamb between eight and twelve months old. Still alive, it lies with bound feet in an unmistakably sacrificial posture curiously reminiscent of famous images of martyred saints like Stefano Maderno’s moving sculpture of Saint Cecilia at the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Rome. The painter draws on Zurbar&aacu
In this painting, following His crucifixion and descent from the Cross, the body of Christ lies upon a white cloth. On His left is a beam of the cross bearing the sign that identifies Him as King of the Jews and the skull that, according to tradition, indicated that Calvary had been the burial site of Adam. At the other end of the painting, a washbasin recalls the tradition of the arma Christi, an
A figure suddenly appears on the left in a forge where various blacksmiths are working, dressed in an orange robe and wearing a laurel wreath, with rays of light emerging from his head. This is Apollo, who addresses himself to Vulcan, the blacksmith nearest to him, whose stance reveals his lameness. Everyone has stopped working, astonished by the news Apollo is recounting: the adultery of Vulcan`s
The subject is drawn from the narration in Jacobo de la Voragine`s 13th-century Golden Legend of Saint Anthony the Abbot`s voyage to the Egyptian desert to visit Saint Paul, the first Christian hermit (4th century). Saint Anthony, whom Velázquez presents dressed in the black-hooded, brown habit of the Hospitallers of Saint Anthony, appears five times in the painting. In the background, he a
A monkey dressed as a sculptor works in his studio, making a statue of a satyr while another helps him and a third, dressed in elegant clothes, watches his work attentively. Other works by the artist are visible in the background, including the tomb of another simian. This work is paired with The Monkey Painter (P01805) and both offer Tenier´s critical vision of merely imitative artistic activity.
A masterpiece in the history of Western landscape painting, in which Velázquez set out his idea of landscape without any narrative excuse to justify it, this Roman scene and its companion work (P01211) are two of his most singular works. Both combine architecture, plant life and sculpture with living figures and integrate them into a landscaped setting in a very natural way. Critics have re
Inside a room, a young man is copying a classical bust by candlelight. Since 1910 this work appears in the Museo del Prado catalogues as signed and dated on the lower left angle (G. J. Palthe f. 1732), but there is no longer any evidence of this. The scene is typical of the kind painted by Godfried Schalcken (P2078), of whom Palthe was a follower. The young man, the bust and the candle also crop u
This painting belongs to the Neapolitan group of scenes of ancient Roman life that were ordered in the early to mid 1630s by the Viceroy of Naples, the Count of Monterrey, to decorate the Buen Retiro Palace on the outskirts of Madrid.The painting underscores Lanfranco’s extraordinary powers of inventiveness and productivity during a period in which he was otherwise thoroughly preoccupied with a su
