Near the end of his life, in a deposition made in 1677, Calderón is recorded as referring to the ‘natural inclinación que siempre tuvo a la pintura’. This remark is confirmed by the inventory of his possessions made after his death four years later. His paintings were assessed by Claudio Coello, who valued them at 17,000 reales. There were 119 items, most of them religious, but including seven landscapes and thirty-four vases of flowers. These figures are striking, both in terms of numbers and of value. They included Calderón’s most valuable possessions: an Italian painting of St Francis in ecstasy, rated at 3300 reales (300 ducats), and a Last Supper, at 3000 reales. In contrast, four small landscapes were rated at only one ducat (eleven reales) each, and four flower-vases at only twelve reales each. One explanation for the quantity and modest value of the flower-vases, and perhaps of the smaller landscapes, is that they were Calderón’s own work.

While proof that Calderón experimented with brush and canvas is unlikely to be found, it is undeniable that he wrote plays about painting and painters: in this context, the title that comes most readily to mind is El pintor de su deshonra: the secular drama, and the auto sacramental. The drama depicts the middle-aged painter Juan Roca (‘desposado | no mozo’ as his servant euphemistically puts it), who marries the much younger Serafina. Serafina has two other admirers, Don Álvaro and an Italian prince. Juan is a manic-depressive: a creative genius when on a high, but prone to profound melancholy when on a low. He sees imagination as the supreme creative faculty. His powerful creative mind imagines thatSerafina is maintaining a relationship with Álvaro. The relationship is merely a product of his imagination, but he kills them both.

The exact composition date of El pintor de su deshonra, the play, is uncertain: the verse suggests the late 1640s, although it must predate the auto, which is reckoned to have been written shortly before 1647.4 It is tempting to think that Calderón’s starting-point for his plot was the painter Alonso Cano, who was accused of having had his wife murdered for infidelity in 1644.