Saint Thomas

Velazquez was still a teenager in Seville when he painted this apostle, probably around 1618, years before he became court painter in Madrid. Saint Thomas is shown as a young man caught mid-sentence, mouth open in preaching, a book in one hand and the spear of his coming martyrdom in the other. It most likely belonged to a full set of the twelve apostles that Velazquez made for a monastery in Seville, most of which are now lost. He paints the face straight from life, an ordinary man who could have been pulled off the street, lit hard against a dark ground in the Caravaggio manner then spreading through Spain. For a long time the picture hung under another name, Murillo, until a scholar recognised the young Velazquez in it in 1925.