Italian school; 17th century."Saint Lawrence.Oil on canvas. Antique re-colouring.It has repainting

Italian school; 17th century.
"Saint Lawrence.
Oil on canvas. Antique re-colouring.
It has repainting and restorations.
It has faults in the frame.
Measurements: 74 x 52,5 cm; 93 x 74,5 cm (frame).
This work follows the models established by Titian's painting "The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence", located in the church of the Jesuits in Venice, whose copy, also made by Titian, can be visited in the Escorial monastery, and that both, in turn, were based on an engraving by Cornelis Cort, made in 1571. A deacon born in Aragon, near Huesca, and martyred in Rome in 258, his "Legendary Acts" narrate that Saint Lawrence, out of humility, washed the feet of Christians, cured a widow of a headache and gave sight to a blind man through baptism. Three days after the martyrdom of Pope Sixtus II, who had ordained him deacon and entrusted him with the treasure of the Church, he was arrested and ordered to hand over these riches. But there was none of it left, as Lorenzo had distributed it to the poor. Furious at seeing his greed frustrated, the emperor Decius ordered him to be flogged with rods, his ribs burned with a red-hot iron and, finally, to be stretched out naked on a gridiron over a mantle of coals. Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of the poor, among whom he distributed the treasures of the Church. He was also adopted as patron saint of numerous guilds and trades. His duties as a deacon also earned him the homage of librarians, bibliophiles and booksellers, since deacons were entrusted with the custody of sacred books. But it was above all his torture on the gridiron that made him most popular: he was invoked against fire, and was considered the protector of all trades exposed to burns, such as firemen, charcoal burners, bakers, glaziers and ironers, among others. With regard to his iconography, Saint Lawrence is depicted as a young man with his head uncovered, dressed in a deacon's dalmatic on which there are sometimes embroidered flames. He usually carries the book of the Gospels and a processional cross, because carrying the cross and keeping the Gospels was the responsibility of the deacons. A bag or a chalice filled with gold coins allude to the treasures of the Church that the pope entrusted to him, but his most characteristic attribute is the grill, the instrument of his martyrdom.
Titian Vecellio was an Italian Renaissance painter and one of the greatest exponents of the Venetian school, which explains his use of bright, luminous colours, loose brushstrokes and innate chromatic moulding. He was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini (Venice, ca. 1433-1516), an Italian painter of the Fourteenth century, renowned for his sumptuous colouring, landscapes and fluid atmospheres. The death of the principal established artists of the day (Giorgione and his own master, Bellini) and the transfers of Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto to Rome and Bergamo respectively left Titian without rivals, at which point he began his period of expansion in which the Italian artist freed himself from the hermetic canons learned during his youth and began to produce the works that would establish him as a key painter in the history of European art.