Alonso Cano

Sometimes referred to as “the Spanish Michelangelo”, painter, architect, and sculptor Alonso Cano produced primarily religious works—marble figures, monumental altarpieces, and paintings—that filled the churches of Málaga and Granada. Cano served as a painter to the Spanish king in Madrid where he was charged with producing plans for several palaces and a pair of city gates, and later became the chief architect of the Granada cathedral, the façade of which is considered to be a crowning achievement and a highly original work of Spanish architecture. Afflicted with a notoriously erratic temper, Cano was a controversial figure, at one time suspected of the murder of his wife and forced to flee Madrid. In his later years he took religious orders and devoted himself increasingly to painting. Cano’s pictorial work is marked by bold compositions, sharp lines, and classical, statuesque human forms. In their striking modeling of figures set against dark backdrops, his later paintings have been compared to those of the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck.