But Silva was also working on the paintings that would make him a world figure and something of an enigma, even before his master's death. After the usual year of mourning following Jaffe's succumbing to dysentery, Silva relocated to the court of King Phillip IV and began to display his canvases, some 30 oils in the style of the Carravesque realists, an almost diametrical opposition to Jaffe's "Danish Nonism." But it was still a restrained liberation, these early works. In The Birds Attacking Saint Timothy the rooks and kestrels are quick, almost furtive swabs of black, brown, and cobalt green, while Timothy is a plump and arrogant friar before a disheveled, broken, forest altar. Although Jaffe never allowed any portraits of himself to be made, it is assumed that the torn robe and lady's sandals are worn by him in the mural. In the background is a naked boy, bent and drinking from a dead river; the river is rendered at once by a mixture of pointillism and the kind of bold stabs of the brush that one sees in the work of Antonio Galium, the Italian excommunicee and alleged lover of Pope Pious IX. It is no wonder that Jean Dubuffet called The Birds a "prepubescent antitumescence."

Silva is known to have made at least four trips to Italy after Jaffe's death, the second from 1649-1651. It was during this trip that he become most enamored of his Venetian predecessors of the previous century, and most estranged from his own baroque contemporaries; whether this was due to the influences of Jaffe or his bland reception by his peers is still the subject of graduate student theses. During this trip Silva began to move away from portraiture and towards landscapes, and it is believed he was the first serious court painter to forego sketches and studio work to painting his scenery on-the-scene. Nineteen Hills between Rome and the Sea was accomplished in only three weeks of painting, and despite this blistering pace (his wife called it "like chasing bees in cloister") , Silva was able to establish a kind of realistic authenticity that such artists as Frans Halls would draw from in their own compositions.

Nineteen Hills is also remarkable in that it is the first painting in which Silva switched to the signature technique which gave him his sobriquet, "cuadrado punto" (square dot). For the rest of his days, even as court portraitist, Silva signed each work in the bottom right hand corner with a simple square and a dot, in colors contrasting but of the same tone as the background. In still later years, he began to work this square and dot into the actual imagery of the pieces he painted; it is believed that this innovation coincides with his taking as a pupil Van Jarmeer, the future Dutch master consider by more than one British scholar "the greatest of the unknown Hollander artists."

Uninformed scholars today call these squares and dots a precursor, an almost Nostrodamus-like prediction of the hyper-modernist abstract movement that would ruin high art, killing it so thoroughly that today even serious painters are laughingstocks, at large as well as in their own minds. Even informed scholars can't help but wonder how a mind like Silva's, bracketed by Rubens and Rembrandt, could allow such obvious disturbances to tug on the worth of otherwise brilliant work. To date almost every single paper, essay, thesis, dissertation, cover song, newspaper column and stock quote on the subject ends up blaming Jaffe.

At a conference in 1895 a smallish rogue of a professor from the American School of History and Art (South Carolina) displayed Silva's Waiting Ladies, on loan from its then private owner, and showed the room full of incredulous art historians that cuadrado punto's "signature" was actually a map of the painting, the dot showing where in the folds of the queen's sister's dress he had hidden his own name. The painting itself has been long revered: Silva's brushwork evokes the majesty of the fibers and strands of each subject clothes, and by using light and shadow as suggestion instead of extrapolation, he achieves an almost meta-reality; the brain need not translate from two dimensions into three and back into two, nor make the journey from idea to figure to idea again. The mood of the painting is contemplative and at the same time intimate, as if, like his landscapes, Silva was on hand to paint this very scene as it was acted out in its entirety, a visit by the royal queen to her sister, to discuss the distribution of surplus taxes to the poor in Prussia. Silva renders the doors, windows, walls, and furniture like a Holbein on holiday, forgoing linear precision for realistic denouement. It was after Silva's death that King Phillip said, of this piece, "Perhaps the job of painting is not for commoners only after all."

But the discovery of the cuadrado punto maps all but annihilated serious Silva studies for more than 30 years, as more and more of his paintings were rediscovered, most of them in the later style (the post-Jarmeer, so called "Later Period"). It is not known whether Silva was familiar with his mathematical contemporary Ren‚ Descartes or his Coordinate System for Analytical Geometry, but certainly Silva must have used instruments to measure the width (abscissa) and height (ordinate) where his hidden name was placed, for measurements taken by the French Institute of Weights and Measures show that the translation to the small cuadrado deviate only on the sixth decimal place, when compared to where Silva dotted the i in his name.

Study returned to more traditional artistic criticism when it was realized that most if his later pieces did not, in fact, contain his name at all, though they still possessed the cuadrado punto. There is some speculation that it was Jarmeer, not Silva, who painted the name where the dots directed them (being Dutch, Jarmeer would have to have know of Descartes, since the mathematician spent the greater part of his later life in Holland), and that he was not able to finish these "busy puzzles" on all of Silva's work. Unfortunately, no records exist of where Silva's works went after he painted them for the court, and this hypothesis cannot be confirmed. Still, it would have been no easy task for the young Jarmeer to hide Silva's name; one assumes that folds of cloth, boils of clouds, and arrays of leaves where purposefully composed to hide the name, and not merely as future depositories. Scholars do have record that King Phillip directed that the cross of Saint Manitoba be painted on the collar of Silva where he appears in Waiting Ladies after his posthumous decoration of that order's highest honor; and in 1937 the Instituta di Roma reneged on its pledge to allow no chemical testing to be done in its archives, and it was determined that the names hidden in seven of Silva's paintings must have been painted at the same time as the rest of the piece, because the cross of Saint Manitoba was obviously painted as much as thirteen years later. (For more on the testing procedures for authenticating these paintings, consult Geoffrey Niche's "The Salt-Acid Chemical Signature of 1665 Madrid's Water Table" in Scientific America, 1939, issue seventeen).

Therefore, cuadrado punto came full circle from enigma to enigma again, since no one knows what the later period square-dots signify. And as enigma, his paintings have lost their biographical-criticism audience and returned to a place of artistic merit. These later period paintings as a whole resonate with a vibrancy and force that almost denies his earlier and pre-Jaffe's pieces, as if his mentor never existed at all. Hearth Wench manages to convey an immediacy of symbol from the actions of it subject, a simple serving girl, rendering eternal the meaning of perception by balancing air, stone, and grain. Even Rembrandt doesn't achieve this kind of integrity; Hearth Wench possesses none of the passion or mystery of Rembrandt's supernatural lighting effects, and is stronger for it, not weaker.

For the works that must have come at the end of his life, Silva probably used a "camera obscura" to negotiate the play of contrast between light and dark. This allowed him, too, to manipulate bolder colors than the browns, greens, and drab whites of contemporary artists; however, it means that none of these pieces where set outdoors. Indeed, most of the works are lit from a side window, out of which the viewer is not allowed to see. Nonetheless the simplicity of the common subject becomes almost regal with this technique. There is a quiet nobility in the face of the wench, and that same royalty is in the subtle but aggressive shading of the woman in Allegory on the Destruction of Art. The painting might appear to be a self portrait, but must not be, as the painter is dressed like a thirteenth century artist and the mood which he has already accomplished on his canvas is closer to what even a Jaffe would have found reprehensible. The model, dressed in the robes of a Calliope, holding a trumpet and turning her eyes away from the light, obviously trying not to smile, probably as per the painter's harsh instructions. The camera obscura allowed (or forced) Silva to render the light on the basket of apples at her feet as blobs of spilt and curdled milk; in the background the hanging map of Seville is just intelligible enough to see that it is not legible at all. In this painting, Silva put the cuadrado punto on the chest of a small boy, hanging by his knees from a coat rack of sorts in the back corner of the studio. The cuadrado punto is in berry juice, which runs from the laughing boys fingers.

After Silva posthumously received the Cross of Saint Manitoba, a very brief tour of his smaller pieces was sponsored by a French cousin of the Medicis, Guy de Laurent. None of these paintings have been found since.