Der heilige Paulus

Velázquez was still a teenager in Seville when he painted this, years before Madrid and the royal court knew his name. There was no local habit of grand, idealised saints to follow. So he did what the young painters of Seville were doing in the 1610s, in the wake of Caravaggio's dark realism as it reached Spain. He found an ordinary man, sat him down, and studied him closely. The grey beard, the deep creases, the heavy robe falling in almost carved folds, all of it taken from life. Only the faint halo and the book tell you this weathered face belongs to Saint Paul at all. Scholars think the same model sat for the famous Waterseller of Seville, painted around the same years.