15. Antonio Palomino, The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale, Volume One 1715 and Volume 2 and 3, 1724.

Palomino was a Spanish court painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whose biography of artist’s lives predominantly covers Spanish painters and foreign artists who worked in Spain. Like many of the art biographers discussed, his artist’s lives were covered in the last of a three volume work, following a traditional format of earlier connected volumes that had dealt with art theory and practice. The third biographical volume was aptly titled, “The Spanish Parnassus” invoking the hill that the god Apollo inhabited with the Muses of the arts.

             

Palomino’s biography of the painter Velazquez became pivotal in introducing and broadening knowledge of the artist outside of Spain, when it was into English and French. The biographies earned Palomino the honour of being called the ‘Spanish Vasari.’