Christ on the way to Calvary and Saint Veronica

Juan de Valdés Leal was Murillo's great contemporary in Seville, working in a dramatically contrasting style — where Murillo is tender and luminous, Valdés Leal is intense, even violent. This Christ on the Way to Calvary from around 1660 shows his theatrical approach to religious narrative, with compressed figures and agitated surfaces that create an almost hallucinatory urgency. Saint Veronica's cloth bearing Christ's imprinted face adds a devotional element of immediate physical relic.

The scene is crowded and agitated, with figures pressing against Christ from all sides. Valdés Leal's brushwork is energetic and summary rather than detailed, and his palette uses jarring color contrasts — acid yellows, deep crimsons — to heighten the scene's emotional charge.