Maestro de Los Florida

Almost nothing personal is known about the painter conventionally called Maestro de Los Florida. The name itself is a modern art historical label, taken from the altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin that he painted for the chapel of the Counts of Florida at the Cathedral of Teruel, in the historic kingdom of Aragon, in what is now Spain. No birth date, birthplace, death date, or place of death has been documented under this name, and no record of formal training survives.

Scholars have proposed that the hand behind these panels belongs to Juan de Bonilla, a painter documented as active in Daroca and Teruel from 1442 to 1478, with an approximate lifespan sometimes given as circa 1420 to 1500. A separate, less convincing link has also been proposed to a painter named Juan del Villar. Neither identification is treated as certain in the literature, and Maestro de Los Florida continues to function primarily as a notname for an artist working in the Aragonese Gothic idiom of the mid to late fifteenth century, a period marked by the spread of International Gothic conventions through Spanish workshops.

Public critical commentary on this artist is limited almost entirely to auction house material rather than museum or academic press. The research underlying this profile could not confirm a verbatim, attributable catalogue quotation from the 2020 Sotheby's sale, so none is reproduced here. This thin critical footprint is consistent with the artist's standing as a documented but largely anonymous regional master, known mainly through a single altarpiece and a small number of auction appearances rather than through sustained critical or scholarly attention.

The artist's confirmed auction record is Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil, sold at Sotheby's London on 25 June 2020 for GBP 125,000 including buyer's premium (about USD 154,000), against a hammer price of GBP 100,000. No later sale exceeding that price has been identified. There is no gallery or estate representation for this artist in the modern commercial sense; works attributed to him surface through the Old Master departments of major auction houses rather than through primary-market galleries.

There is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed birth or death date, and no settled identity behind the name Maestro de Los Florida; the strongest available link is to a documented but sparsely recorded painter, Juan de Bonilla. The auction history behind this name is thin, built on a single confirmed high-value result rather than a broad, repeat-sale pattern, so any attribution and any pricing comparison should be treated with corresponding caution and checked against current auction house scholarship at the time of a transaction.