Saint Ambrose in his Cradle (?)

The drawing is associated with the painting The Miracle of the Bees (Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville), which opens the series devoted to the Life of Saint Ambrose, painted by Juan Valdés Leal around 1673. The scene takes place when Saint Ambrose was a baby and focuses on a tense moment in which the governess is frightened and is about to scare away the bees that are approaching the child’s face. The father stops her with an expressive hand gesture, and surprise is clearly reflected in his frown and open mouth.

The event takes place in a palace setting, where Ambrose can be seen ‘in the cradle in a hallway in front of the praetorium’, as Pedro de la Vega mentioned in 1572. However, this setting was not Valdés’s original choice. It is possible that he was forced to modify it to conform to Pedro de la Vega’s quote or to change the point of view from which the canvas was meant to be seen, a change that is made evident in this drawing held in the Museo del Prado and that related this drawing to the canvas in this series due to the numerous elements they have in common. The drawing depicts the same figures as in the canvas – the father, the governess, the two women and the child, as well as the little dog – with similar poses and clothing. These figures also share the same arrangement, as they are set in a space divided by a sectioned wall. The emphasis on the architectural details and the pronounced vanishing points correspond to those found in Valdés’s work, as do the expressiveness of the figures and his treatment of their hands to narrate the scene.

Nevertheless, there are considerable differences between the canvas and the drawing. In the former, the semi-circular finish has been removed, and above all, the scene has been moved to an outdoor space. In the drawing, the scene unfolds in a large interior room with high ceilings and is divided in two: a space on the left in which a four-poster bed can be observed, and another on the right presided over by two paintings. The latter opens onto a long corridor with a semi-circular ceiling that directs the viewer’s gaze towards the outside and gives great depth to the scene, which is designed to be viewed from the left.

The drawing is quite finished. This possibly indicates that it is a presentation sketch for the project. At present, it can be technically and stylistically related to a work on Saint Michael, with which it shares the style of the wash and some pen strokes used to render small details, including chins and the sunken skin at the bottom of the neck and eyes. However, the one in the Prado has a much more finished style, an aspect that may contribute to the introduction of a new set of attributions of drawings to Valdés, since not many drawings by his hand are currently known. In fact, Valdés is known to have been an excellent and prolific draughtsman thanks to Palomino. The artist was not only one of the founding members of the Seville Academy of Drawing and Paintings (1660) and the one who showed the greatest mastery (with the exception of Murillo); but also, during his stay in Madrid in 1664, he ‘asistió á las academias particulares que tenían los profesores en sus casas, dibuxando dos y tres guras en cada noche’.

Cenalmor, Elena y Portús, Javier, Juan Valdés Leal. Serie de la vida de San Ambrosio. En: El hijo pródigo de Murillo y el arte de narrar en el Barroco andaluz, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2021, p.134