A provocative study of a freedman painter that recognizes the labor of enslaved artists and artisans in seventeenth-century Spain.

Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670), his enslaved studio assistant, has long been a landmark of European art. It was painted in 1650, the same year that Velázquez signed papers freeing Pareja, who then built his own successful career as a painter of religious subjects and portraits. This book—the first monograph on Pareja—revises our understanding of artistic production during Spain’s Golden Age and discusses Pareja’s ties to both Velázquez and the Madrid School of the 1660s. Hardcover, 256 pages.