San Antonio Abad y san Pablo, primer ermitaño

In the early 1630s Spain's king Philip IV was building the Buen Retiro, a sprawling pleasure palace on the edge of Madrid, and dotting its gardens with small hermitage chapels. Velazquez painted this around 1634 for one of them, the hermitage of San Pablo, and it is one of the very few times this great painter of faces gave himself over to a wide, rocky landscape. It tells an old story of the Egyptian desert. Saint Anthony walks out to find Saint Paul, the first Christian hermit, and a raven flies down carrying the loaf of bread that has fed the old man each day. Look across the picture and you meet Anthony not once but five times, asking directions from a centaur, meeting a satyr, and at last reaching the cave.