Interior of a church or the Offering

Two boys go ahead with torches, lighting a woman and her companions out of a dark church. The Prado will not date this little panel more closely than the end of the 16th century to the first half of the 17th, so what it carries instead of a date is a paper trail. In 1746 a clerk of Isabel de Farnesio, queen of Spain, listed it among her pictures at the palace of La Granja as the interior perspective of a church, out of which comes a woman accompanied by others, with two men in front lighting the way with torches. In 1766 the same collection valued it at 300 reales. By 1794 it had moved to the prince's lodge at El Escorial, and the valuation was 4,000. Two of its inventory numbers were painted onto the face of the panel and are still legible, 503 in the lower left corner and 1545 in the lower right.