Juan de Valdés Leal

Juan de Valdés Leal (1622–1690) painted death with an intensity no Spanish artist matched. Born in Seville to a Portuguese father, he trained in Córdoba under Antonio del Castillo before returning to his birthplace in 1656. Four years later, he helped Bartolomé Esteban Murillo found the Seville Academy and later served as its president from 1663 to 1666. The two painters couldn't have been more different: where Murillo offered tenderness and serenity, Valdés Leal delivered drama, violence, and morbid spectacle.

His style belonged to the Spanish Baroque at its most theatrical. Early paintings like Saint Andrew (1645) already showed his preference for exotic colors, dramatic lighting, and vigorous brushstrokes. But Valdés Leal found his true subject in vanitas, the meditation on death and the futility of earthly glory. His masterpieces came from the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville, commissioned by the brotherhood leader Miguel de Mañara. In Ictu Oculi ("In the Blink of an Eye") shows a skeleton stamping out a candle while trampling symbols of power and knowledge. Finis Gloriae Mundi depicts decomposing corpses of a bishop and knight, their rotting flesh rendered in unflinching detail. Murillo reportedly said that "one had to hold one's nose" while viewing them.

Valdés Leal married Isabella Carasquilla in 1647, herself a painter. Several of their children became artists: his daughters specialized in portrait miniatures. Ill health plagued his final years. He died in Seville in 1690. The Hospital de la Caridad still displays his vanitas paintings. Other works hang at the Museo del Prado, the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.