The Calling of Saint Matthew

Velázquez died in Madrid in August 1660. Juan de Pareja finished this canvas the next year, and it is a big one, more than three metres across, a tax collector's office packed with coins, ledgers and heavy cloth, with Christ arriving from the right to call Matthew away from all of it. Then look at the far left. The man in gentleman's dress, the only figure who turns and meets your eye, is Pareja himself, and the sheet of paper in his hand carries his name and the year 1661. He had spent roughly 20 years enslaved in Velázquez's household and workshop. A manumission signed in Rome in 1650 made him legally free in 1654. On the back wall of the counting room hangs a second, smaller painting, Moses raising the bronze serpent.