In his work as a treatise writer, the king's painter Antonio Palomino de Castro made clear his admiration for the work of Luca Giordano, with whom he collaborated during his stay in Spain and from whom he learned the fresco technique.
This sober painting of St. Peter of Alcántara reflects this influence, in the way it depicts the sky and in the saint's clothes similar to those of Giordano's philosophers that he was able to see in the collection of the IX Count of Santisteban, which he examined directly in order to appraise it and praised in his Pictorial Museum.
A connoisseur of the life of the saints and their iconography, he depicts the Franciscan saint as a penitent in meditation, virtues for which he was known and which earned him canonisation in 1669. His conviction of the value of prayer led the Extremaduran saint to synthesise the Book of prayer and meditation by Fray Luis de Granada, in a small, low-priced version that he titled Treatise on prayer and meditationPalomino seems to have wanted to represent in this painting the work of synthesis and dissemination as a labour inspired by the Holy Spirit, hence the pen and inkwell next to the open book, typical of any iconography of a saint in meditation, which act as paperweights while the saint meditates absorbed in the Holy Spirit.