ABSTRACT
In the early 1620s, Cano probably went from Pacheco's household to the workshop of Juan Martinez Montanes, the most important Sevillian sculptor of the seventeenth century, whose refined style had a decisive influence on Cano's sculpture, particularly evident in his early pieces. In spite of the prominence that Cano had gained as an artist in the 1630s, and of the sizable dowry that had come to him with his marriage to his second wife in 1631, in 1636 Cano was put in debtors' prison, the first of the many troubles he brought upon himself throughout his life. In the Vision of Saint John the Evangelist, the figures are idealized and their movements elegant, and the lines created by their contours weave them into a cruciform pattern that realizes fully the ornamental value of their forms.
