Alfonso Rodríguez y Gutiérrez de Ceballos, who holds a degree in History, Law, and Philosophy and a PhD in History from the Universidad Complutense, is professor emeritus at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a full member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He has devoted many studies to art theory and treatises of the Renaissance and Baroque, the art of the Society of Jesus, and iconographic schemes in the figurative arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of a vast amount of literature on Spanish art.