The exhibition reunites for the very first time almost all of the known scarce production of the painter Juan Bautista Maíno, an original, but almost unknown Spanish painter of the first half of the XVII century. Maíno was one of the most authorized voices in artistic matters in the court of Philip IV, he was the monarch’s drawing teacher during his youth.
It seems that Maíno began his training in Madrid, where he came to from Italy towards 1600, a place in which he continued his preparation for more or less ten years. When he came back to Spain during the second decade of the XVII century, Maíno developed a painting technique based on the most innovative Italian artistic tendencies of that time, with a clear influence by Caravaggio, Carracci, Guido Reni or Gentileschi, among others, interpreted with an unusual singularity in other Spanish painters of his time who had also been trained in Italy.
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