Madrid school; around 1620."Bathsheba's Bath"Oil on canvas. Rentered in the 19th century.It has an old frame.Measurements: 147 x 111 cm; 151 x 119 cm (frame).Rarely have we been able to find a type of work like this in the Spanish painting of the early seventeenth century. An explicit female nude captures our attention. The lady immersing herself in a pond with the help of a maid while another carefully combs her hair. She seems to ignore her suggestive assistants and fixes her gaze directly on the viewer. The scene is enveloped by an idealized garden from which a fanciful Renaissance palace emerges. At the top, a luxuriously dressed man looks down from the rooftop in awe, calling out to his followers. It is King David. Fascinated by the sensual beauty of the young Bathsheba, he has him summoned by his courtiers and already in the palace they consummate their passion.A story collected in the Old Testament seems to be the ideal pretext for painter and patron to allow us to see one of the rarest examples of our painting. The erotic content that emanates from both the nudes and the attitudes, the theme of carnal passion, as well as the visual delight for an imaginary garden bordering on utopia in which the fantastic architecture and the animals create an atmosphere as suggestive as the characters.This privileged vision is difficult to fit into the hand of any particular painter. Its theme and the complexity of the composition are out of the usual rigidity of the Madrid court of the beginning of the century. The designs of the gardens seem inspired by the engravings of the famous Hans Vredeman de Vries and at the same time with the royal spaces described in the painting of the time as the view of the Casa de Campo by Felix Castello in which we can see in a grotto the fountain with the Manzanares as a fluvial deity and reminds us of the Neptune in the center of our work. At the same time we can see similarities in terms of composition in works by Juan de la Corte and his school. The most similar paintings in terms of scenery could be compared with those preserved in the Municipal Museum of History of Madrid.