This is where the Leonardo question comes in, and it has to be handled correctly. It’s one of those places where facts (or lack thereof) turn into legend.
There are early sixteenth-century references to a Spanish painter called “Ferrando Spagnolo” (Fernando the Spaniard) working in Florence around 1504 to 1505, during the period when Leonardo da Vinci was engaged with projects like the Battle of Anghiari. Some scholars have proposed that this “Ferrando” might be Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina. The name aligns. So does the timing. And when Yáñez reappears in Valencia, the work points backwards towards Italy. But the identification remains unproven. The record doesn’t confirm it. No hometown. No signature. No link. Still, the friction stays. A Spanish painter. In Florence. While Leonardo is working. The coincidence holds.
Yáñez’s mature work aligns unusually closely with Leonardo’s way of thinking about painting. Not in obvious quotations, but in deeper habits. Faces are modeled through slow transitions rather than hard lines. Light moves gently across flesh. Emotion is contained rather than acted out. Narrative is reduced. Figures feel mentally present, not posed.
Whether Yáñez ever worked directly with Leonardo matters less than the fact that he clearly absorbed ideas associated with Leonardo’s circle. Even being nearby would’ve been enough.
That influence becomes difficult to ignore when you gaze upon Yáñez’s magnificent painting, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, on display in the Prado Museum. It currently sits in a room adjacent to the Prado Mona Lisa. That placement isn’t accidental, as they each compliment each other’s presence. Unfortunately, Saint Catherine is often overshadowed by her neighbor. Two women. Two calm contemplations. Two paintings built on restraint rather than drama. One famous beyond reason. The other, still waiting to be met on its own terms.
Painted around 1510 in Valencia, not long after Yáñez’s return from Italy, Saint Catherine shows a painter who already knows what he is not interested in doing. There’s no narrative sprawl. No sequence of events. No theatrical suffering. Catherine stands alone, monumental and still. Her story is present only in symbols: the sword, the book, the crown, the shattered wheel beneath her. The wheel was meant to kill her, but it broke before it could touch her. The sword alludes to the execution that followed. Yáñez doesn’t narrate any of it. He condenses it. The violence is finished. The meaning remains.
Her gaze doesn’t flinch. Her hands rest calmly. Everything here is quiet, but nothing is vacant.
Earlier Spanish depictions of saints often leaned hard into storytelling. You were shown everything: the trial, the pain, the miracle, the death. Yáñez strips all of that away. He trusts recognition. He trusts stillness. He lets the painting wait to be understood instead of explaining itself.
Catherine isn’t pressed against the surface. She occupies space with weight and intention. One foot anchors her. The architectural setting recedes instead of competing. Drapery gathers and folds the way cloth actually does when there’s a body underneath it. Each layer, scarlet, lapis, embroidered sleeve, isn’t just colored, it’s structured. Yáñez isn’t decorating her. He’s constructing her.
And then there’s the face.
Catherine doesn’t perform sanctity. She doesn’t confront you. Her gaze is lowered, inward, self-contained. The modeling is soft without being vague. Light moves gently into shadow. Nothing snaps. Nothing announces itself. This isn’t imitation. It’s internalized method.
She is beautiful, but not idolized. The beauty is quiet and measured. Her features are narrow, and the corners of her mouth suggest thought rather than ease. There’s no smile, just a pause held behind the eyes. The elegance lives in proportion, not effect.
The face does not simply resemble Leonardo’s women. It thinks the way they do. Not in likeness, but in mood. That same cool gravity. That same magnetic inwardness. You can see it most clearly in the Prado’s Mona Lisa: the downcast eyes, the immobile lips, the slow comprehension behind the glance. Catherine is less theatrical, but no less formed. She’s not a copy of Leonardo’s type, she’s a product of his climate.
This is where you can see the difference between borrowing Italian style and thinking Italian thoughts.
Yáñez doesn’t stop being Spanish, and he never tries to become Florentine. There’s a seriousness in the work that feels Iberian rather than Tuscan. Color is full but restrained. Emotion stays inside. Italy doesn’t give him extravagance. It gives him discipline.
That discipline carries across his work in Valencia. In collaborations with Fernando Llanos, another painter shaped by Italy, you see a shared language emerge: monumentality, balance, figures that feel anchored rather than ornamental. Together they help establish a fully Renaissance way of painting in eastern Spain, not as a novelty, but as a working system.
Some ask what his paintings were like before he left for Italy. We don’t have that material, and pretending otherwise only weakens the subject. The real story is that when he comes back, the change is already complete. There’s no retreat into flatter space. No return to linear description. No decorative fallback. The human figure has been redefined for him, and that definition holds.
Standing in the Prado today, moving from the Prado Mona Lisa into the next room and meeting Saint Catherine, the connection feels less academic than spiritual. Both paintings make the same bet: that quiet lasts, that restraint outlives drama. That a face, properly observed, can carry more weight than action ever could.
Yáñez never becomes Leonardo. He never gets Leonardo’s fame. But he does do something incredibly impressive. He absorbs an Italian revolution and brings it home without flattening it, diluting it, or disappearing inside it.
He leaves Spain.
He comes back changed.
And that change never leaves his work.
Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina was a Spanish Renaissance painter, most closely associated with Valencia, working in the early years of the sixteenth century. He was Spanish, trained in Spain, and at some point early in his career, he left for Italy.
We don’t know much about his earliest years. There’s no secure group of early works to point to, no reliable trail that lets us watch him develop inside Spain. That absence is real, and it limits what we can say. What we can address instead is this: what does it mean when an artist returns to Spain already thinking in Italian Renaissance terms, already comfortable with how painters there were constructing bodies, form, and interior life?
That’s the story here. Not transition. Return.
By the time Yáñez shows up clearly in the record, in Valencia in 1506, he is already painting with confidence in Italian Renaissance methods. His figures have weight. Space behaves logically. Drapery explains bodies instead of decorating them. Faces feel inhabited. None of this reads like experimentation.
We meet him after the learning has already settled.
Italy, for Yáñez, functions like a black box. He goes in Spanish. He comes out different. The work he makes afterward tells us enough. Whatever happened there wasn’t casual. It was sustained. And it stuck.
The Silence Between Florence and Valencia: A brief look at Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina
Monroe Pettigrew © 2026