St Luke

This undated portrait of Saint Luke at the Bowes Museum represents Pantoja de la Cruz working within the tradition of apostle and evangelist series — extended devotional programmes in which each of Christ's apostles, or the four gospel writers, was depicted as a separate panel or canvas forming a unified theological ensemble. Luke held a special place in this tradition: he was believed since the early centuries of Christianity to have been a painter who made the first portrait of the Virgin Mary, making him the patron saint of painters and a figure of particular interest to artist-devotional culture. Spanish painting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries produced many apostle series for church and private devotional use. Pantoja's characteristic approach — dark ground, three-quarter figure, careful rendering of the saint's attributes — is well suited to this devotional format. The absence of a date makes precise attribution complex, but the style is consistent with his mature period around 1600–1608.

The dark-ground single-figure format of apostle series paintings allowed Pantoja to concentrate on face and attribute rendering without the compositional challenges of narrative scenes. Luke's traditional attributes — the ox and the gospel book, sometimes a painter's brush — are rendered with the documentary precision that characterised Pantoja's still-life-within-portrait passages. The face carries a quality of individual presence despite the devotional formula.