Juan Antonio de Frias y Escalante (1633 - 1669). Juan Antonio de Frías Escalante or, as he signed, Juan Antonio Escalante was a Spanish Baroque painter of the Golden Age. At a very young age, he settled in Madrid where he was a disciple of Francisco Ricci, with whom he maintained a close relationship, becoming his testamentary executor. Despite his early death, he developed an important career working almost exclusively for the Court's churches and convents. An admirer of Venetian painting by Tintoretto and Veronese, as Palomino observed, who called him a follower of that style in composition and "grace of attitudes", he was also indebted to Van Dyck, in addition to making frequent use of prints Flemish paintings copied with hardly any variations, as in the Conversion of San Pablo in the Cerralbo Museum, based on an engraving bySchelte à Bolswert on a composition by Rubens, or on the attributed Andromeda in the Museo del Prado, a copy of a print by Agostino Carracci, with the only significant difference being the dress that covers the maiden, hiding the nudity of the original model. But the most direct and constant influence received by Escalante could be the intimate and classical work of Alonso Cano, interpreted with great sumptuousness and clarity of light, as could be seen in the Annunciation of the Hispanic Society of America, dated 1663, very similar in composition and style in which the man from Granada painted for the church of La Magdalena in Getafe. Proof of his admiration for Cano is the acquisition of three of his mythological paintings at the auction of the assets of José Cisneros, held in Madrid in 1665. The remaining two lost, the goddess, described as between the doors, it must in all probability be the Juno from a private collection in Madrid, released by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez in 1999, whose profile, very significantly, Escalante did not hesitate to use for the Saint Joseph with the Child, Saint John and Two Angels of the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias, transferring the silhouette of the saint to that of the goddess. A precocious and prolific artist, among his many compositions Antonio Palomino particularly praised a Dead Christ that was in the convent of the Clérigos Menores and truly looks like Titian's, currently in the Museo del Prado and the Santa Catalina de Alejandría de la former parish church of San Miguel, current church of Santos Justo y Pastor or Las Maravillas, “a most graceful and whimsical figure that seems to be from Tintoretto”. With exquisite delicacy and light tones he exploited the theme of the Immaculate Conception and devotional subjects on small-format canvases, such as the Child Jesus with Saint John from the Prado Museum or Saint Joseph from the Hermitage. Of the numerous paintings cited by Palomino in Madrid churches, some of the eighteen subjects of the Old Testament taken as prefigurations of the Eucharist, which he painted between 1667 and 1668 for the sacristy of La Merced Calzada, are also preserved, scattered among different museums and some lost., a convent in which there were other works of his and among them a painting of the Redemption in the refectory where, according to Palomino, he portrayed himself among the captives. Although Palomino highlighted the imitation of TintorettoandVeronesein them, because he follows that style in composition in all of them, and the one that represents theAngel waking up the prophet Elijah in the desert has in fact been attributed for many years to the Venetians Domenico Fettiand and Francesco Maffei, ​it is an influence that must be understood in conjunction with that received fromRubens, observable for example in Abraham and Melchizedek, composition taken from one of the cartoons for the Descalzas Reales series of tapestries. The San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts preserves a Nazarene carrying the cross reminiscent of Titian, from the Manuel Godoy Collection.