Juan Martín Cabezalero

The Assumption of the Virgin in room 018A of the Prado spent more than a century under the wrong name. Ferdinand VII bought the canvas in 1829 for the palace at Aranjuez, and from 1854 the catalogues gave it to the Burgos painter Mateo Cerezo, despite obvious differences from everything else of his. In 1985 the Prado reassigned it to Juan Martín Cabezalero and dated it to around 1665.

He was baptised at Almadén, the mercury-mining town in Castile, on 24 August 1645, and the family later moved to Madrid, where he trained under Juan Carreño de Miranda, the Asturian painter who became court painter to Charles II. The first work Cabezalero signed is dated 1666, a Saint Jerome now in Dallas. In 1667 he took a commission for four large Passion canvases for the chapel of the Cristo de los Dolores in Madrid and delivered them the following year. He died in Madrid on 24 June 1673, at 28.

That leaves a working career of six or seven years, all of it spent in his twenties, which is worth knowing before looking at anything of his. Older accounts push the birth back to about 1633 or 1634, following the 18th-century painter and biographer Antonio Palomino, who reached the year by counting back from a reported age at death. The baptism entry at Almadén is the document, and it says 1645.