Finis Gloriae Mundi

still-life

Valdés Leal's two relentlessly gruesome paintings are located just inside the entrance of the chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville. The first, entitled In Ictu Oculi (In the twinkling of an Eye), is a highly charged representation of the futility of worldly goals and pursuits. The path of glory lead but to the grave, which is unflinchingly rendered in the companion picture, Finis Gloriae Mundi (The End of Worldly Glory), where vile bugs feast on the rotting remnants of human flesh.

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About the Artist

Juan de Valdés Leal

1622 – 1690

Spanish painter and engraver, born in Seville, where he worked from 1656 after some early years in Cordova. With Murillo he helped to found an academy of painting there in 1660, and after Murillo's death in 1682 he was the leading artist in the city. Like Murillo, he was primarily a religious painter, but he was very different in style and approach. He had a penchant for macabre or grotesque subject-matter, and his style is characterized by feverish excitability, with a vivid sense of movement, brilliant colouring, and dramatic lighting. His most remarkable works are two large Allegories of Death (commissioned 1672) in the Hospital de la Caridad, Seville. He also polychromed Roldán 's great altarpiece in the Caridad.

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