Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
A sword, and the problem with it
Paul is identified by a sword and a book. The sword is unusual among martyrs' attributes in that it is also a weapon he might plausibly be shown using, which makes it the one sign in the system that can be misread as an action. The book resolves the ambiguity — an elderly bearded man with both is Paul and has been for centuries. 23 titles in this collection carry his name, which puts him just behind Peter.
What the record holds
The catalogue dates the work to 1620 and gives Private Collection as its location — the field 118 entries in this collection carry, which is to say roughly one in five. No dimensions are recorded here either, and in that this entry is unexceptional: 266 of the 611 works have an empty dimensions field. It is filed under male portraiture and Religion, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.
What is left when the record is thin
An entry with no measurement and no public address gives a page very little to stand on. What remains is a year, a nationality, a style label and a title, and the title is the part that carries the identification. That is a fair summary of the limit of this kind of catalogue: it can tell you who the picture is of long before it can tell you where the picture is.
Sources
4 references- Diego Velázquez — Wikipedia
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptised 6 June 1599 – 6 August 1660) was a Spanish Baroque painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He is generally considered on
- Velázquez, Diego — Getty ULAN
Spanish painter, 1599-1660
- Saint Paul (Velázquez) — Wikipedia
Saint Paul (Spanish: San Pablo) is a painting by Diego Velázquez that is in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. The piece was created around 1619 during the early stage of Velázquez's artistic career before he moved t
- Diego Velázquez - Saint Paul - Google Art Project — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
