Enrique Simonet

In 1890, on a scholarship in Rome, the young Spanish painter Enrique Simonet finished the picture that made his name. An old anatomist stands over the opened body of a young woman on a marble table, holding her heart up to the light, a bloody scalpel in his other hand. He called it simply the Anatomy of the Heart.

It caught the age exactly, the late 19th century's fascination with science, dissection and the body laid bare, and it won prizes and travelled through the European exhibitions. Later a story grew up that the dead woman had been a prostitute pulled from the river, and people renamed the picture And She Had a Heart, though Simonet had meant nothing so sentimental.

He was a fluent, well-trained academic painter who went on to religious scenes, big historical canvases and coastal views of his native Málaga. None of them ever eclipsed that early, unsettling image of an old man weighing a young woman's heart in his hand, now in the museum of Málaga.