San Pietro in lacrime

Around 1617 Velázquez was barely 18 and had just passed the examination that let him open his own workshop in Seville. This is the work of that beginner, not the court painter he would become in Madrid. The subject was a Counter-Reformation favourite in Catholic Spain: Saint Peter weeping after he denied knowing Christ three times, an image meant to model repentance for the faithful. You can already sense the young painter's instinct for plain, weighty realism rather than sweetness, the tear-streaked face lit against a dark ground. The Prado acquired the picture only in 2013 and gives it to the teenage Velázquez, among the earliest things his hand seems to have made.