The heads of Saints Paul, John the Baptist and James the Great on platters on a draped ledge

The artist, a member of the lesser nobility, trained in Seville with Francisco de Herrera and had his own workshop from 1630. Strongly influenced by the work of such contemporaries as Herrera, Zurbarán, Murillo and Valdés Leal, the style of his works varies through a career that is generally regarded as having reached its creative zenith in the Calling of Saint Matthew and Saint John the Baptist before the Sanhedrin, both of 1668 and located on the outer wall of the main altar in Seville Cathedral. The present work is a fine example of what was perhaps the most constant theme of the artist's oeuvre: his rather idiosyncratic predilection for painting the severed heads of Saints, of which perhaps the two best-known examples are those of The Head of Saint John the Baptist and The Head of Saint Paul of 1670 in the Church of El Salvador, Seville.