JÁUREGUI Y AGUILAR, JUAN de. – Spanish poet and painter, of an aristocratic family, born in Seville, where he was baptized on 24 November 1583, died in Madrid in 1641. He was squire to Queen Elisabeth (the wife of Philip IV) and a knight of Calatrava.
He resided for some time in Rome, deriving artistic and poetic inspiration from it (he copied from Michelangelo, Raphael, and Guido Reni; executed portraits; translated Tasso’s Aminta with great distinction and began a free version of Lucan’s Pharsalia). On returning to Seville, he took sides against Quevedo and Góngora, to whom he opposed a Discurso poético (Madrid 1624) and an Antidote contra las Soledades (the manuscript is held in the Madrid National Library); but he was a friend of Lope de Vega and Cervantes, who praised his Aminta. His poetic production partly adheres to the Italianizing manner (Rimas, Seville 1618, which, alongside secular poems, contains several sacred lyrics, such as Al desponsorio de Cristo con s. Teresa and the paraphrase of Psalm 136), while in part it approaches the Góngorist fashion that J. y A. had opposed in theory; the poem Orfeo, on the other hand, is inspired by Ovid (Madrid 1624).
As a writer, J. y A. provides interesting evidence of Spain’s aesthetic taste at the beginning of the seventeenth century (cf., in particular, his Dialogo entre la naturaleza y la dos artes, pintura y escultura and Por el arte de la pintura, Madrid 1633); as a painter, besides several portraits (including the famous one of Cervantes, now in the Madrid Museum) and the engravings for the Jesuit L. Alcázar’s Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi (Antwerp 1619), he left an engraving of the venerable Luis de Granada and two canvases depicting s. Joseph and s. Teresa of Ávila.