“But we are still left with an unsolved mystery,” added Fovel with one of his mischievous grins. “Long before he painted The Last Supper, Juan de Juanes was already well known for his splendid series of portraits of Christ with the Eucharist. These rich devotional images, which were made on gold leaf, show Jesus holding up the sacrament in his right hand, while his left hand holds the chalice, very much like this one here.”

Fovel indicated one of these hanging near us in the gallery. “This was the first one of this series, from about 1545—he would have been only about twenty—and the Grail he paints here is just an ordinary cup.”

I took a closer look at it.

“Then, for whatever reason, he painted several more versions in which he replaced the plain cup with the ‘real’ agate chalice. You get the impression that Juanes was obsessed with this image. It’s as if someone had told him that the actual cup used at the last supper was in Valencia, not far from Fuente la Higuera, his home village, and also made him go see the relics of the Holy Face that were so venerated in Alicante and Valencia, and pushed him to keep copying that face compulsively.”⁴

“Strange! So you’re saying that Juan de Juanes became a kind of self-made expert on relics, especially the Grail?”

“Yes,” replied Fovel, “though he didn’t become an expert overnight. It took years. There are two of his paintings of Christ in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia, which they refer to as the ‘blond one’ and the ‘dark one’ because of their different hair color, and the Grail he paints in these is still rough, as if he’d painted it from memory, or a description. But in the later versions, like the ones celebrated in Valencia Cathedral, which he would have painted between 1570 and 1579, the chalice is beautifully detailed.”

“So he had a chance to study it.”

“Or he held it in his hands! What we do know for certain is that Juanes was considered as learned as he was pious. Some believe that he even traveled to Italy to familiarize himself with the magnificent work of Leonardo and Raphael, which he assimilated like few others of the time. It would have been around that time that he decided to change his name from Vicente Juan Masip, which was very close to his father’s name, Vicente Masip, who was also a painter. He settled on the more Latinized Juan de Juanes, the name with which he earned his fame.”

“Did he leave anything he might have written about the Grail?”

“Not that we know of. I’ve studied his life as much as the scant documentation allows, and the main thing worth mentioning is that, like Raphael Sanzio, Juanes had an unusual approach to painting.”

“In what way?”

“Well, I’ve just given you a clue,” he flashed me a malicious smile. “Some came to call him the ‘Second Raphael,’ which I don’t think was just because of the similarity of their styles. The thing is, before beginning a painting, Juanes would spend days in fasting and prayer, preparing his soul. He would tremble before starting any piece of work that he considered sacred, and on the day that he was to begin a painting, he went to early Mass and took communion. It’s little surprise, then, that some critics have said that his work—particularly the paintings of Christ—‘are of a beauty so divine that they belie a human provenance.’⁵ Or that these paintings ‘look as if they had not so much been painted with the hand as with the spirit,’⁶ since it could be said that the Lord guided his hand, and the most beauteous of men chose [Juanes] to paint him, much as Alexander chose Apelles of Kos.’ ”⁷

“What does all that mean?” I asked Fovel.

“That the art looks as if it was inspired by heaven itself. We do know, for example, that often, while he was painting, certain . . . things would happen.”

“What kind of things do you mean?” This was sounding particularly weird.

“Well, there was a lot of talk about what happened while he was painting his majestic Coronation of the Virgin, which was also called the Immaculate Conception—or Tota Pulchra—for the Jesuit church in Valencia. No matter how you look at it, that is not a normal painting.”

“Please get to the point, Doctor,” I insisted impatiently.

“It’s perfectly simple. This enormous painting, almost ten feet high, was commissioned by Father Martin Alberro, a Jesuit from the Basque country who was headed for the seminary of San Pablo in Valencia and who, by the way, was de Juanes’s confessor. The Virgin had appeared to Father Alberrro in an ecstasy—a lady shod with the moon, clothed with the Sun, and crowned with stars, like the Virgin of the Apocalypse of St. John, bathed in splendors—and had personally given him instructions on the kind of portrait he was to paint. Alberro in turn passed these instructions on to Juanes. It was an odd request; according to these instructions, the painting was to have neither perspective nor any kind of geometry but was to incorporate in some very visible position the most important mystical names for the Virgin, like Civitas Dei, Stella Maris, Speculum sine macula, or Porta Coeli.”

“The Door to Heaven,” I muttered.

“And in fact, the painting became exactly that.”

“What do you mean?”