Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos

When Velazquez painted this he was still a teenager in Seville, not yet 20, years before he would become court painter in Madrid. Saint John sits with a heavy book open on his knee, pen ready, looking up at a small glowing figure in the clouds, the vision of the woman of the Apocalypse that he would set down as the Book of Revelation. What is striking is how ordinary the saint looks. Velazquez seems to have painted a real young man from the Seville streets, bare feet, plain features, given the same close attention he was bringing to kitchen scenes at the time. The picture had a companion showing the Immaculate Conception, made while the city was celebrating that belief, and both probably hung together in a Carmelite convent there.