Yesterday, my friend texted me this, titled: ‘Puzzle for the Day’.

I replied: ‘No idea what I’m looking at, but tempted to send it to @artdecider.’

Turns out this garland of recycled cans is phase one in an ingenious plan to keep mongoose from jumping into the chicken run she built in her garden outside Ronda, mongoose being a common pest in rural Andalusia. ‘I need to string more cans all the way round,’ she explained. Then she signed off with a brilliant suggestion: ‘why not write something about Cotan?’

And I could see it immediately: that swooping line, the brilliant colour. If it weren’t made of beer cans her mongoose alarm wouldn’t be totally out of place in a painting by the Spanish Baroque artist Juan Sánchez Cotán.

Although he’s hardly a household name, Sánchez Cotán’s work is instantly recognisible. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish artists enthusiastically copied his still-lives and their distinctive style and composition continues to influence artists today. However, the overwhelming number of his surviving paintings are religious, on the walls of Spanish churches, monasteries and museums (and one excellent example in Durham). But despite his career as a religious painter – the only genre in early seventeenth-century Spain that guaranteed success – his name is synonymous with still life. Not only was he one of the first true still-life painters in Europe and arguably Spain’s greatest, he may even have invented the bodegón, a distinctly Spanish version where objects are not necessarily symbolic but appear to assert lives of their own.

Originally, bodegón (pl, bodegones) referred to a rustic eating place, but by the early 18th century it defined still-lives, and paintings that combined still life with narrative scenes, usually stories from scripture or moral allegories. Several artists of the ‘Spanish Golden Age’ including Diego Velásquez and Francisco de Zurbarán excelled at bodegones; others, like Juan van der Hamen and later Luis Egidio Meléndez made their names exclusively in the genre. But Sánchez Cotán’s bodegones were utterly unprecedented. They’re possibly the first metaphysical still-lives in European art. Hugely influential, they were copied by artists before and after his death, and it’s actually thanks to these copies that we know two of his lost works. One painting Still life with cardoon and francolin, was copied so many times that versions still occasionally surface on the art market, exasperating scholars and specialists burnt by perennial disappointment.

Sánchez Cotán painted all of his known bodegones between about 1600 and 1603, when still life was a very new genre. European artists had painted arrangements of fruits, flowers, tableware, dead animals, et al from at least the 14th century, but only to decorate or support various compositions, never as a main subject. In fact, before about 1590, if we exclude Roman wall paintings, still life didn’t really exist as a distinct genre in European art. By 1600, however, European artists, particularly in Spain, began to paint independent still-lives. [NB, there are lots of reasons for this, all of them outside the scope of this post. But theories range from the influence of mannerist artists patronised by Philip II to what art historian Jonathan Brown called the ‘Spanish taste for evoking the real world through specific details’.]

Suffice it to say (here, at least) that Spain was on the cutting edge of this particular genre and Sánchez Cotán was, if not the first, definitely the most visionary still-life painter of his time. However, his reputation is based on a handful of paintings made over a few years.

These still-lives are the Goldberg Variations of Spanish art, repeating the same composition and motifs, each object painted with precise naturalism. Except there are 30 compositions by Bach, and only twelve documented still-lives by Sánchez Cotán, only six of which are known to survive. The last time one was offered on the art market, it sold for over £4 million.

This was a staggering price at the time, fuelled partly by the mystery that surrounds Sánchez Cotán, because not only do we have so few of his still-lives, we really know little about him.

He was born (or baptised) on 25 June 1560 in Orgaz and by 1580 he had moved to nearby Toledo, which was the cultural capital at the time. We know that he possibly trained there with Blas del Prado, who is actually the earliest documented Spanish still-life painter, although none of his known works survives. Prado had connections to various intellectual circles, and we know that for more than twenty years Sánchez Cotán had a successful career in Toledo. In 1603, when he closed his studio to retire to Segovia as a Carthusian lay brother, an inventory included about thirty religious paintings, several portraits (including an extraordinary likeness of a bearded woman), a few racy mythological scenes, two paintings by El Greco (who actually owed him money)[1], and twelve still-life paintings and studies.

All of Sánchez Cotán’s religious pictures were painted in a soft, illusionistic style influenced by the mannerist artists he studied in the collections of Philip II’s monastery-palace at Escorial. But his bodegones are completely different, depicting in tangible detail what people ate every day – lemons, apples, melons, cabbages, cardoons – foodstuffs whose shelf-life allowed him time to paint before they rotted. (For example, he never painted fish, unlike his followers Meléndez, Alejandro de Loarte and Felipe Ramírez.) In fact, some objects, like the cardoon (a type of thistle), might not have been painted from life, but from a prepared study. Another distinctive motif – the fruit and vegetables suspended on cords – was a traditional way of storing food, which leads us to his setting.

This austere cupboard-like space was actually a working part of a Spanish household known as a canterero, a larder niche where produce and game could be kept cool. By arranging his objects within this space, geometrically, even mathematically, but with no fixed vanishing point, he could take advantage of how certain forms rest on a flat plane, balance on edge, or project towards the viewer. Furthermore, he added mystery to the space by playing with its boundaries, suspending fruits and vegetables on cords secured unseen above the upper margin, and by bathing everything in strong lateral light to throw form into sharp relief and create an illusion of indeterminate depth. He took advantage of what certain objects feel like, using the bottom-heavy arch of the cardoon to describe curves looping in and out of the picture plane, or the slender cones of carrots to point towards other forms or even the viewer. He painted each piece of fruit, every vegetable, every game bird objectively, and yet sensually, encouraging the viewer to read its specific mass, texture and colour. The overall effect is similar to a tabernacle.

So who exactly did he paint these still-lives for? Was it some patron with a taste for neo-platonic symbolism? Or did he paint them for his own satisfaction, to exercise techniques and curiosities that would have been out of place in the idealised religious subjects that were his stock in trade? No; and not exactly. He did have powerful patrons in Toledo who collected his bodegones, such as Cardinal Pedro Girón García de Loaysa (1542-99) and his successor Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (1546-1618). Sandoval also cultivated a botanical garden, and Sánchez Cotán studied natural sciences and perspective. And he was, after all, a very successful painter in Toledo, a city that was dominated by the Church but whose collectors, as Jonathan Brown noted, were ‘receptive to all kinds of innovation’. Above all, he was devout, and Spanish Catholicism of his time was not only profound, it was sensual, with a clear emphasis on how faith “feels”.

So why did he stop painting bodegones in 1603, when he left Toledo to enter a monastery? Again, we don’t know. There are no known still-lives apart from the six surviving examples. (However, the bodegón in Granada was possibly painted after 1603; it is not listed in his studio inventory.)

We also don’t know exactly why he entered a Carthusian monastery, although it would explain the inventory, since Carthusians were and still are a contemplative order and reject secular possessions. However, he never took orders; actually continued his career as a religious painter; and apparently, he painted one last still life, possibly in Granada, where he died in 1627. And it’s useful to point out that swopping a secular career for a sacred one might look like an unusual decision, but it certainly wasn’t a radical one in seventeenth-century Spain. For example, Juan Bautista Maíno continued to paint after he became a Dominican friar in 1613; and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was so dedicated to the Church he gained most of his commissions from powerful fraternities and never had to chase secular patronage.

Sánchez Cotán’s bodegones are truly weird. But while our fascination with them might go beyond the rare and technically brilliant, we shouldn’t look for hidden meanings. The fact is these paintings reward our attention. They appeal to our senses in a language we understand, one that’s rooted in our everyday needs and experiences. They are beautiful, bizarre, and to seventeenth-century Spanish eyes, at least, possibly even funny (no one would have stored apples or carrots on strings). But if Sánchez Cotán deliberately expressed any ‘secret knowledge’ in his bodegones, it was his grasp of how the sublime lives in the mundane, and how wonderful it is to see things for what they truly are, even a carrot, especially if you’re hungry.

[1] El Greco (c. 1541-1614), was considerably older than Sánchez Cotán and although he became one of the greatest painters in European art, after he arrived in Toledo in 1577, he did not have an easy time of it. At first, he could only get institutional commissions and his first royal commission (Allegory of the Holy League, c. 1579–82) left Philip II cold. The painters probably met between 1580 and 1603, and Sánchez Cotán possibly helped El Greco financially before his career gained momentum in the 1580-90s, when he had important commissions - including his masterpiece for Count Orgaz - but spent several years completing each one.