CANO, Alonso
(b. 1601, Granada, d. 1667, Granada)

Descent into Limbo

c. 1640
Oil on canvas, 169 x 121 cm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

From 1640 on, Cano's technique became increasingly pictorial, that is to say, increasingly Baroque, acquiring some of the subtleties he had previously ignored. Perhaps his most important painting is the Descent into Limbo (in the County Museum, Los Angeles), a strange, rather illustrative composition, anecdotal in the movement imparted to the figures, but including one of the rare, and one of the most beautiful female nudes in Spanish art.