Passing of Saint John of God

This work depicts Saint John of God kneeling before an altar, from which a celestial host of singing angels emerges. While the saint is comforted by an angel, his soul ascends towards the Eternal Father and the dove of the Holy Spirit. The unreality of the scene rests, to a great extent, on its spatial ambiguity, on the coexistence of naturalistic effects (like the exaggerated perspective of the table) with the elements presented in a single plane. The painting has been attributed by the art historian Francisco Stastny to the indigenous Cusco-born painter Juan Zapaca Inga. Without a doubt, the undefined space in which the scene seems to float, as well as the lovingly drawn, almost calligraphic, lines of the undulating folds seen in the fluttering cape of the angel, places this work alongside some of the finest canvases in the series on the life of Saint Francis, painted for the Franciscan convent in Santiago de Chile and signed by Zapaca in 1685.