Juan Pantoja de la Cruz was held in high esteem as an animal painter; was also known as a landscape and still life painter who exploited the new secularized art forms that spread across Europe at the close of the sixteenth century. Acclaimed as a gifted artist by contemporary writers, Lope de Vega and Francisco de Quevedo have left eloquent evidence of their admiration for Pantoja. In La hermosura de Angelica (1602), an imitation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Lope de Vega couched his praise in the following couplet: "Juan de la Cruz que si criar no pudo / Dio casi vida y alma a un rostro mudo;" and Quevedo extolled Pantoja's work as a miniaturist in the poem "El Pincel", written in 1615, seven years after Pantoja's death.