In 16th and 17th century Spain, the figure of the painter is a work in progress. His gesture – often defined by the underlying ideology and by the pieces which will outlive it – seems lost forever or frozen into archetypes and allegories. The new genre of the self-portrait states the existence of the painter’s hand but without any objectivity: “Has the painter, painting himself, been nobody but a performing trained monkey rambling on?”, Pascal Bonafoux wonders in the conclusion of his study Les peintres et l’autoportrait. Topics creep in even in the direct reflection the painter offers when painting himself: they help identify him, decipher the masterpieces and mark out the way to glory. However, those topics live and sometimes escape the obviousness one tends to see in them. Starting with St Luke, who should be the ideal one to lead the painters towards the recognition expected in the wake of the anti-reformation movement, but who has to reckon with Apelles, the Greek master whose excellence resounds from a much-envied summit of fame. Those legends become diverse and ramified through the metaphoric game of language, evolve according to theoretical claims and show their limits when given substance. Their frequency, intensity and conjunctions bear witness to the ways one follows to grasp the figure of the painter – not his psychology but his stature, liberal and noble. The focus on the painter’s touch – which relegates the gesture of the copying monkey to the shadows – sheds a light on the artist’s progression in the Golden Age of Spanish Painting
