Díaz del Valle, Lázaro sometimes Díez del Valle

Date born: 1606

Place born: León, Spain

Date died: 1669

Place died: Madrid, Spain

Author of an early biography of Spanish artists. Díaz del Valle was a singer and court personage in the Capilla Real and Chaplain to Charles II of Spain. There he met many of the court painters, including Diego Velázquez, Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo, Pedro de la Torre and Juan Escalante. His avocation was writing, though his works remained in manuscript. He wrote a three-volume history, Noticia histórica del principio de la Inquisición y la historia y nobleza del Reino de León y Principado de Asturias. Philip II commissioned him to translate the Italian art-historical biographies of Giorgio Vasari (q.v.), to which Díaz del Valle included biographies of Madrid painters. Beginning in 1656 his art writings, unsystematic accumulations of notes cribbed from other treatises and biographies, were assembled as Varones ilustres with a second volume in 1659. The model for this was the esthetic writing of Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos (fl. 1600) and Juan Alonso de Butrón (fl. 1630).

Díaz del Valle's biographies of artists provided much material for later Spanish art historiographers. The writer and proto-art historian Antonio Palomino (q.v.) and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez (q.v.) both used his writings for their own more significant artistic biographies.

Home Country: Spain

Sources: Castrillón, Juan L. "D. Lazaro Díaz del Valle y de la Puerta." Boletín de la Academia de la historia 12 (1888): 471-479; Gaya Nuño, Juan Antonio. Historia de la crítica de arte en España. Madrid: Ibérico Europea de Ediciones, 1975; Jacobs, Michael. "Introduction." Lives of Velázquez. London: Pallas Athene, 2006, p. 21.

Bibliography: Noticia histórica del principio de la Inquisición y la historia y nobleza del Reino de León y Principado de Asturias (manuscript, vol. 1 destroyed in 1939; vol. 2 whereabouts unknown; vol. 3, London, British Library); Varones ilustres. 2 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Diego Velázquez, 1656, 1659.