(b ?Badajoz, ?c.1520; d Badajoz, c.1586). Spanish painter. He worked for most of his life in Badajoz, a town on the Portuguese border, and his style—formed away from the influence of the court or great religious and artistic centres such as Seville—is highly distinctive. His pictures are usually fairly small and he concentrated on devotional images such as the Mater Dolorosa or Ecce Homo, painted with intense spirituality. The piety of his work has earned him the nickname ‘El Divino’. His style owes something to Netherlandish art, but his misty modelling seems to derive more from Leonardo da Vinci.
Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)
