This study of a clergyman holding a model ship was identified in older catalogues of the Hamburg drawings as Saint Augustine. In fact, it is Pedro González Telmo, a missionary from Palencia who belonged to the order of the Preachers and was canonized and venerated in Spain as Saint Telmo.
This sheet is related to another drawing by Alonso Cano in Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.[1] It could be a second version of that sketch, which would have been the first for a painting of Saint Gonzalo that was intended for the altarpiece of Nuestra Señora de la Paz at what is now the cathedral of Santa María Magdalena in Getafe. Cano worked on that altar around 1645. The poses of the figures are very similar; here, only the clothing in the lower portion and the pose of the head are varied.
The Museo Nacional del Prado preserves a drawing considered to be a copy after Cano that in terms of draftsmanship has a great deal in common with this one (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, D 66). The curls of the hair and the relatively static contours of the clothing compare quite favorably. Nevertheless, Harold Wethey ascribed the drawing, previously attributed to Cano, to a successor. Zahira Véliz did not include it in her 2011 catalogue of Cano's drawings.

Jens Hoffmann Samland


1 See Saint Gonzalo of Amarante in Véliz 2011, 308-9, no. 56.
2 Wethey 1952, 233; and Véliz 2011.

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