Circle of JUAN DE VALDÉS LEAL (Seville, 1622 - 1690)"Saint Thomas AquinasOil on canvasSize: 53 x

Circle of JUAN DE VALDÉS LEAL (Seville, 1622 - 1690)
"Saint Thomas Aquinas
Oil on canvas
Size: 53 x 42 cm; 63 x 52 (frame).
An artist who was strictly a contemporary of Murillo, he was his greatest pictorial rival in the Seville of his time. The comparison between the two painters has been frequent, artificially encouraged by the character of their works: if Murillo's was seen as the very expression of gentleness and calm, the harshness and dramatism of Valdés Leal's work and, above all, the extreme truculence of his best-known works, the vánitas of the church of La Caridad in Seville, serve to confirm the dichotomy. However, despite the difficult character with which he is portrayed in the sources, the fact is that Valdés Leal's work is quite varied and is in line with the painting that was being done in his environment. We do not know when he moved to Córdoba, although it is likely that he had already trained as an artist in his native city. It has been speculated that he was influenced by the workshop of Herrera the Elder, and also by the art of the Cordovan Antonio del Castillo, as possible influences for his first known signed and dated work, the Saint Andrew in the church of San Francisco in Cordoba, dated 1647. In it he combined the monumentality of the figure of the saint with a naturalistic approach with visible success. In 1656 he settled in Seville, where he spent most of his life. In 1660 he was one of the founders of the Academy of Drawing, of which he became president in 1663. The following year Palomino set out on his trip to the court and to El Escorial, a journey that can still be understood as an apprenticeship, driven by his eagerness to become acquainted with the works of the great masters in the royal collections. In 1667 he joined the Brotherhood of Charity in Seville, whose founder had been Miguel de Mañara, the noble visionary author of the eschatological Discourse on Truth, to which Valdés would remain attached from then on. In 1671 Valdés Leal had the opportunity to work as an architect on the ephemeral decorations that the Seville cathedral had installed to celebrate the canonisation of Saint Ferdinand. Thanks to these works Palomino defines him as "a great draughtsman, perspectivist and architect". He also produced two engravings, reproducing his works in the cathedral, for Fernando Torres Farfán's book celebrating the event, which gives us an insight into his work as an architect. These are his most important works as a printmaker, although his engraving of the cathedral monstrance, a self-portrait and the posthumous image of Miguel de Mañara are also known. In 1672 he was in Cordoba, an occasion Palomino took advantage of to meet him in person. This gives added value to the Cordovan treatise writer's affirmation of Valdés Leal's literary interest, as he describes him as possessing "the ornament of all good letters, not forgetting those of poetry". Shortly before his death he suffered an illness that prevented him from continuing to work, forcing him to leave his commissions in the hands of his son, a painter in his workshop.