Tête d'apôtre

Velazquez was barely 20 and still in his native Seville when he painted this, around 1619, at the very start of a career that would soon carry him to the royal court in Madrid. It survives only as a fragment, cut down from a larger canvas that once held a row of apostles. A Saint Thomas now in Orleans and a Saint Paul in Barcelona appear to be its separated companions. Which apostle this one is, nobody can say for certain, beyond that he is neither of those two. The young painter gave him the weathered face and thick hands of an ordinary Sevillian labourer, and lit him hard out of a brown darkness in the manner Caravaggio had lately made current across Europe.