Juan de Valdés Leal - Head of Saint John the Baptist

Lot description

JUAN DE VALDÉS LEAL Seville 1622 - 1690 Head of Saint John the Baptist. c. 1670-1675 Oil on canvas Dimensions 45 x 62 cm Inscribed with inventory number 78. Important baroque frame. Provenance: - Private collection, Madrid. The appearance of this work on the market represents an important addition to the pictorial catalogue of Juan de Valdés Leal, one of the most outstanding painters of the Spanish Baroque. This decapitated head of the Baptist can be related to a drawing of the same subject that is preserved in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, one of the few drawings confirmed by his hand, which until now was linked to a similar work of Carmen Calzado in Córdoba. The paintings of the severed heads of saints were a huge success in Sevillian Baroque painting, with such outstanding examples as those made by Sebastián de Llanos Valdés and Valdés Leal himself. The supremacy of colour over drawing, the very personal red tone of the cloak, the white lead glints on the metal of the tray and the knife, the halo barely suggested by a thin and brief curved line and the fluidity of the phylactery, which seems to spill like a waterfall into the tray, speak to us of the mastery that the Sevillian artist had achieved in these years. If in the heads of Saint John and Saint Paul of Carmen Calzado de Córdoba, painted in the years 1655-1656, the workmanship was softer and the palette more luminous, twenty years later Valdés is more crude and concentrated on the essential. Lacking any concession to kindness, this head is a “still life in the divine” that responds to the most austere aspect of the Sevillian baroque spirit. Text extracted from the study carried out by the researcher Mr. Antonio Romero Dorado.