La cena in Emmaus

Around 1622 Diego Velazquez was still a young painter in Seville, barely past 20, working in the dark, grave manner that Caravaggio had made famous in Italy. Here he takes the gospel story of two travellers who share a meal with a stranger on the road to Emmaus and realise, as he breaks the bread, that he is the risen Christ. Velazquez gives the figures ordinary, weathered faces and sets them in heavy shadow lit from a single source. Within a year or two he left Seville for Madrid, and before he was 25 he had become court painter to King Philip the Fourth.