Attributed to Baltasar de Figueroa the Elder (Santafé de Bogotá, 1629–1667) “Pietà” Oil on canvas. Relined. 104 x 84 cm. Baltasar Vargas de Figueroa was a colonial painter from the Kingdom of New Granada, the progenitor of a line of artists, who has been mistakenly identified with a painter of the same name from Seville. He must have lived in Santafé de Bogotá and later in Tumerqué and Mariquita. He married Doña Catalina de Saucedo, with whom he had three sons (Melchor, Gaspar, born around 1594, and Bartolomé), who would later also become painters and work alongside him on projects for the Church of Tumerqué. After being widowed, he married a second time to Inés de Tumerqué, and had seven children—one daughter and six sons, one of whom was a doctor and four of whom were friars. This was around 1640, as in that year Gaspar de Figueroa gave his mother a black slave who was his property. He must have died in Tumerqué. We can consider him the patriarch of the dynasty of colonial painters in the Kingdom of New Granada, and its founder, as he taught his children the basics of the art he had learned in Spain. And his children and grandchildren later founded the famous Figueroa Workshop, where the great masters of the colony would be trained. In this work, Figueroa is believed to be depicting Saint Jerome, one of the Doctors of the Church, assisted by two angels who are cleaning the wound on his chest caused by the stone with which he struck himself for greater asceticism and mortification. He appears alongside the tamed lion from whose paw he removed a thorn, and which became his faithful follower and defender; on the right we see the cardinal’s hat (although he was never a cardinal, he did work in Rome with Pope Damasus (382), who commissioned him to revise the Latin translation of the Bible—the book to the right of the painting, behind his legs—based on the original Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint. After the Pope’s death, he returned to Palestine and in 386 moved to Bethlehem, where he completed the translation of the so-called Vulgate. He died there in the year 420. For this work, we do not know if Baltasar Vargas de Figueroa, like all colonial painters, made use of any European engravings. In his will, referring to his belongings, he states: “books on the lives of the saints, with prints for the paintings, plus a book on architecture, necessary for art, plus more than eighteen hundred prints that will have cost some twelve, others a patacón, and others four reales.”