MADRID – The oil painting entitled “The Education of the Virgin” attributed to Diego Velazquez and held by Yale University in the United States “is not a Velazquez,” American Hispanist and art history professor Jonathan Brown said in an interview with Efe.

In an interview granted to Efe for the exposition entitled “Pintura de los Reinos. Identidades compartidas en el mundo hispanico” (Painting of the Realms: Shared Identities in the Hispanic World) that will begin this week in Madrid, Brown said that the creator of the work “is a follower of Velazquez who made a pastiche of a motif taken from the painting of Juan de Roelas.”

“I don’t see much chance of it really being a Velazquez,” the art expert said.

He recalled that he had the opportunity to study the work closely and that therefore he can say that, in his opinion, “it’s not a painting of much quality.”

The finding of “The Education of the Virgin” was announced last July by John Marciari, the commissioner of Italian and Spanish painting at the San Diego Museum of Art, after the painting was located by the Yale University Art Gallery in its inventory during preparations for an ongoing expansion and renovation project.

Other experts, like Benito Navarrete – the director of the Velazquez Center in Seville, Spain, a professor at the University of Alcala in Alcala de Henares near Madrid, and a disciple of historian Alfonso Perez Sanchez – and Enrique Valdivieso, one of the top experts on Spanish baroque painting, had supported the find and emphasized its importance.

The painting – which was over 300 years old and in poor condition at the time – was acquired about 1885 by a family in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, and it was donated to the university in 1925. EFE