Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Born	December 1617; Seville
Died	April 1682 (aged 64); Seville
Occupation	Painter

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Seville, baptized January 1, 1618 – April 3, 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Trained in late naturalism, he evolved toward formulas characteristic of the High Baroque, with a sensibility that at times anticipates the Rococo in some of his most distinctive and most imitated iconographic creations, such as the Immaculate Conception or the Good Shepherd as a child.

A central figure of the Sevillian school, with a large number of pupils and followers who carried his influence well into the 18th century, he was also the Spanish painter best known and most esteemed outside Spain. He was the only one for whom Sandrart included a brief and embellished biography in his Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae of 1683, together with the painter's Self-Portrait engraved by Richard Collin.^[2]^[3]

Shaped by his clientele, the bulk of his output consists of religious works destined for Sevillian churches and convents as well as for private devotion. Unlike other great Spanish masters of his time, however, he also practiced genre painting continuously and independently throughout much of his career.^[4]

Life and work

Murillo must have been born in the last days of 1617, since he was baptized in the parish of Santa María Magdalena in Seville on 1 January 1618.^[5] He was the youngest of fourteen siblings, the children of the barber Gaspar Esteban and of María Pérez Murillo, who came from a family of silversmiths and counted a painter or two among her close relatives. In keeping with the anarchic usage of the time, although he occasionally signed as Esteban, he commonly adopted his mother's second surname. His father was a well-off barber, surgeon and bloodletter who was sometimes given the title of bachiller,^[6] and of whom a document of 1607 said that he was "rich and thrifty". He was the leaseholder of some real estate next to the church of San Pablo, whose second life rights Bartolomé inherited and which provided him with subleasing income for almost his entire life.^[7] At the age of nine, within the span of six months, he lost both his father and his mother and was placed under the guardianship of one of his older sisters, Ana, who was also married to a barber-surgeon, Juan Agustín de Lagares. The young Bartolomé must have maintained good relations with the couple, since he did not change residence until his marriage in 1645, and in 1656 his brother-in-law, by then a widower, named him executor of his will.^[8]

Training and early years

There is hardly any documentary information about Murillo's early years and his training as a painter. It is recorded that in 1633, when he was fifteen, he applied for a license to travel to America with some relatives, for which reason he made a will in favor of a niece.^[9] According to the custom of the time, he must have begun his artistic training in those years or somewhat earlier. It is quite possible that, as Antonio Palomino stated, he trained in the workshop of Juan del Castillo, who was married to one of the daughters of Antonio Pérez, Murillo's uncle and baptismal godfather and himself a painter of religious imagery.^[10] A modest painter, characterized by the dryness of his drawing and the kindly expressiveness of his faces, Castillo's influence is clearly noticeable in what are probably the earliest of Murillo's surviving works, whose dates of execution could correspond to 1638–1640: The Virgin Giving the Rosary to Saint Dominic (Seville, Archbishop's Palace, and former collection of the Count of Toreno) and The Virgin with Fray Lauterio, Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum), both of dry drawing and cheerful coloring.^[11]^[12]

According to Palomino, upon leaving Juan del Castillo's workshop sufficiently skilled to "support himself by painting for the fair (which then prevailed greatly), he made a batch of paintings for a cargo to the Indies; and having by this means acquired a bit of capital, he went to Madrid, where with the protection of Velázquez, his fellow countryman (...), he repeatedly saw the eminent paintings of the Palace".^[13] Although it is not improbable that, like other Sevillian painters, he painted devotional pictures for the lucrative American trade at the start of his career,^[14] nothing indicates that he traveled to Madrid at this time, nor is it likely that he made the journey to Italy attributed to him by Sandrart and denied by Palomino after investigating the question, as he said, with "exact diligence". Moreover, in the Cordoban's view, the unfounded supposition of a trip to Italy arose from the fact "that foreigners do not wish to grant in this art the laurel of Fame to any Spaniard who has not passed through the customs houses of Italy: without noticing that Italy has been transferred to Spain in statues, eminent paintings, prints, and books; and that the study from nature (with these antecedents) abounds everywhere".^[15]

Palomino, who had come to know him, although without dealing with him personally, said he had heard from other painters that in his early years "he had remained shut up all that time in his house studying from nature, and that in this way he had acquired the skill" with which, upon exhibiting his first public works, painted for the Franciscan convent of Seville, he won the respect and admiration of his fellow citizens, who until then had known nothing of his existence and progress in the art.^[16] In any case, the style displayed in his first important works, such as those paintings for the small cloister of the convent of San Francisco, could have been learned without leaving Seville, from artists of the previous generation such as Zurbarán or Francisco de Herrera the Elder.

Seville in the 17th century

Holding the monopoly on trade with the Indies and having an Audiencia, various courts of justice, among them that of the Inquisition, an archbishopric, the Casa de Contratación, the Mint, consulates and customs houses, Seville was at the beginning of the 17th century the "paradigm of a city".^[17] Although the 130,000 inhabitants it had at the end of the 16th century had diminished somewhat as a result of the plague of 1599 and the expulsion of the Moriscos, when Murillo was born it was still a cosmopolitan city, the most populous in Spain and one of the largest on the European continent. From 1627 onward some symptoms of crisis began to appear because of the decline of trade with the Indies, which was slowly shifting toward Cádiz, the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War and the separation of Portugal. But the greatest impact was produced by the plague epidemic of 1649, whose effects were devastating. The population was halved, with some 60,000 dead, and it never recovered: large urban areas, especially in the working-class parishes of the northern part of the city, were left half-deserted, with their houses turned into empty lots.^[18]

*Josua van Belle*, 1670, oil on canvas, 125 x 102 cm, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Murillo portrayed Belle, a Dutch merchant who arrived in Seville in 1663, with the elegant pose characteristic of northern portraiture, which he could have known from the painting collections of the merchants of that origin established in the city, in front of a bright purple curtain that cannot be appreciated in this reproduction.

Although the crisis affected the various segments of the population unequally, the general standard of living declined. The lower classes, the hardest hit, staged a short-lived hunger riot in 1652, but in general terms charity served as a palliative for the injustice and misery that affected equally the beggars who crowded at the doors of the episcopal palace to receive the loaf of bread the Archbishop handed out daily and the hundreds of "shamefaced" poor counted in each parish or in institutions specifically devoted to their care. Prominent among these was the Brotherhood of Charity, revitalized after 1663 by Miguel Mañara, who in 1650 and 1651 had acted as baptismal godfather to two of Murillo's children. The painter, who was a devout man, as shown by his entry into the Confraternity of the Rosary in 1644, his reception of the habit of the Venerable Third Order of Saint Francis in 1662 and his frequent presence at the bread distributions organized by the parishes to which he successively belonged, also joined this institution in 1665.

Less affected by the crisis, the Church also felt its consequences: after 1649 hardly any new convents were established, only two or three until the 19th century, compared with the nine male convents and one female convent that had been founded between the year of Murillo's birth and that date.^[19] Its nearly seventy convents were, without doubt, more than enough for a city that had seen its population decline so drastically; but the absence of new conventual foundations did not put an end to the demand for works of art, since churches and monasteries continued to be artistically enriched by their own means or through donations from well-off private individuals, such as Mañara himself.

Trade with the Indies, although it did not generate an industrial fabric, continued to provide work for weavers, booksellers and artists. The silver buyers, who were responsible for refining the ingots and taking them to be coined at the Mint, were professionals found only in Seville; nor did the officials of the Mint lack work, at least seasonally, when the fleet arrived in port.^[20] And there was never a shortage of merchants arriving from abroad, who made Seville a cosmopolitan city. It is estimated that in 1665 the number of foreigners residing in Seville was around seven thousand, although naturally not all of them were engaged in trade. Some had fully integrated into the city after making their fortune: Justino de Neve, patron of the church of Santa María la Blanca and of the Hospital de Venerables, for which he commissioned some of Murillo's masterpieces, came from one of those families of old Flemish merchants established in the city as early as the 16th century.^[21] Others arrived later: the Dutchman Josua van Belle and the Fleming Nicolás de Omazur, both portrayed by Murillo, arrived in the city after 1660. Cultured as well as wealthy men, they must have traveled to Seville with portraits and pictures from their homelands, which would explain the influence of Bartholomeus van der Helst, among others, on the Sevillian's portraits.^[22] They were also responsible for spreading Murillo's fame beyond the peninsula, notably Nicolás de Omazur, whose friendship with the painter led him to commission, after the painter's death, an engraving of the Self-Portrait now in the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a laudatory text in Latin possibly written by Omazur himself, who besides being a merchant was known as a poet.^[23]

First commissions

In 1645 Murillo married Beatriz Cabrera Villalobos, from a family of well-off farmers of Pilas and niece of Tomás Villalobos, a goldsmith and familiar of the Holy Office, who became her guardian when she moved to Seville.^[24] The couple had ten children, of whom only five—the youngest just fifteen days old—survived their mother, who died on 31 December 1663.^[25] Only one, Gabriel (1655–1700), who moved to the Indies in 1678, barely twenty years old, and who became Corregidor de Naturales of Ubaque (Colombia),^[26] seems to have followed his father's profession, for which, if Palomino is to be believed, he showed good gifts and "greater hopes".^[15]

In the same year as his marriage he received the first important commission of his career: the eleven canvases for the small cloister of the convent of San Francisco in Seville, on which he worked from 1645 to 1648. Its paintings dispersed after the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain,^[27] the series narrates, with a didactic purpose, some rarely depicted stories of saints of the Franciscan Order, especially followers of the Spanish Observance to which the convent belonged. In the choice of subjects, the emphasis was placed on the exaltation of the contemplative life and the life of prayer, represented in Saint Francis Comforted by an Angel in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and The Angels' Kitchen in the Louvre; on Franciscan joy, exemplified in Saint Francis Solano and the Bull (Patrimonio Nacional, Royal Alcázar of Seville); and on love of neighbor, specifically reflected in Saint Diego of Alcalá Feeding the Poor (Real Academia de San Fernando). With a strong naturalistic emphasis, in the tradition of Zurbarán's tenebrism, in this last canvas he brought together a complete repertoire of popular types portrayed with gentle dignity, carefully arranged in a simple composition of parallel planes set against a black background. In the center, around the cauldron, stands a group of beggar children in which one can already see the interest in childhood themes that the painter would never abandon.^[28]

While the series as a whole can be explained within the monastic tradition initiated by Pacheco, the naturalism of some of its pieces and the interest in chiaroscuro show an affinity with the work of Zurbarán that could already be considered archaic, if one bears in mind that Velázquez and Alonso Cano, of the same generation as the Extremaduran master, had abandoned tenebrism years earlier.^[29] The attraction to chiaroscuro, however, would become even more pronounced in some later works, though always within his early production, such as the Last Supper in the church of Santa María la Blanca, dated 1650. But alongside this taste for intense and contrasted lighting, some canvases of the same Franciscan series reveal novelties that, distancing him from Zurbarán, would explain the good reception of the commission, even though it was modestly paid: for instance, the diffuse celestial light enveloping the retinue of female saints accompanying the Virgin in the horizontal canvas depicting The Death of Saint Clare (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, dated 1646), where the figures of the saints already reveal the sense of beauty with which Murillo would habitually portray female figures; or the dynamism of the figures populating The Angels' Kitchen, which depicts the lay brother Fray Francisco de Alcalá levitating and the angels busy at their tasks in the kitchen. Nevertheless, alongside these successes, a certain clumsiness in solving problems of perspective can also be seen in the series as a whole, and the use of Flemish prints as a source of inspiration is evident. To them is largely owed the dynamism of the angelic figures, taken mainly from the Angelorum Icones series by Crispijn van de Passe. Other sources used, such as Rinaldo and Armida, an engraving by Pieter de Jode II after a composition by Anthony van Dyck made only two years before the commission of the Franciscan series, show that Murillo could be very well informed about the latest novelties in painting.^[30]^[31]

From 1649 to 1655: the impact of the plague

In the years immediately following the terrible impact of the plague of 1649, no new commissions of that scale are known, but there is a large number of devotional images, among them some of the painter's most popular works, in which the interest in chiaroscuro lighting departs from the Zurbaranesque through the pursuit of greater movement and emotional intensity, interpreting sacred themes with delicate and intimate humanity. The various versions of the Virgin and Child or of the so-called Virgin of the Rosary (among them those in the Museum of Castres, the Palazzo Pitti and the Museo del Prado), the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Holy Family with a Little Bird, both in the Museo del Prado, the youthful Penitent Magdalene in the National Gallery of Ireland and in Madrid, Arango collection, and the Flight into Egypt in Detroit belong to this period, in which he also tackled for the first time the theme of the Immaculate Conception in the so-called Concepción Grande or Immaculate Conception of the Franciscans (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes), with which he began the renewal of its iconography in Seville following the model of Ribera.^[32]

Also from this period, now in the realm of secular painting, is the Boy Delousing Himself or Young Beggar in the Musée du Louvre, the first known evidence of the painter's attention and dedication to popular motifs with child protagonists, in which a note of melancholic pessimism has been seen in its depiction of the little basket-carrier ridding himself of vermin in solitude, a pessimism that he would completely abandon in his later works of this genre, which are endowed with greater vitality and joy.^[33] Of a different order are the rediscovered Old Woman Spinning at Stourhead House, previously known only through a mediocre copy kept in the Museo del Prado, and the Old Woman with a Hen and a Basket of Eggs (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which may have belonged to Nicolás de Omazur; these are genre paintings conceived almost as portraits from direct and immediate observation, although they also reveal the influence of Flemish painting through prints by Cornelis Bloemaert.^[34] Finally, the first documented portrait, that of Don Juan de Saavedra (Córdoba, private collection), also dates from 1650.^[35]

With its archbishop and its more than sixty convents, Seville in the 17th century was an important center of religious culture. There, popular religiosity, encouraged by the ecclesiastical institutions, sometimes manifested itself vehemently. Such was the case in 1615 when, according to Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga and other chroniclers of the time, the whole city took to the streets to proclaim the conception of Mary without original sin in response to the sermon of a Dominican friar in which he had expressed a "not very pious opinion" regarding the mystery. In reparation, processions and tumultuous festivities were held that year and the following ones, in which Black and mulatto people took part, and even "Moors, men and women", as was said, would have taken part with their own festivity had they been permitted.^[36] The plague of 1649 also led to the intensification of certain devotions with such meaningful titles as those of the Christ of the Good Death or of the Good End, and to the founding or renewal of confraternities such as that of the Agonizantes (the Dying), whose purpose was to provide the brethren with suffrages and a dignified burial.^[37] In that atmosphere of intense religiosity, the ecclesiastical clientele constituted only a part, and perhaps not the largest, of the broad demand for religious paintings, which would explain Murillo's production of these years, intended for private clients rather than for churches or convents, with repeated motifs and copies produced by the workshop, as is the case with the half-length Saint Catherine of Alexandria, whose original, known through several copies, is currently in the Fundación Focus-Abengoa in Seville. Numerous private individuals took on the founding or endowment of churches, convents and chapels, but in addition, paintings or simple prints of religious subjects could not be missing from any home, however modest. A statistical study of 224 Sevillian inventories between 1600 and 1670, recording a total of 5,179 paintings, yields a figure of 1,741 pictures of religious subjects in private hands, that is, somewhat more than a third of the total; only slightly more, 1,820, were secular paintings of any genre, and for the remaining 1,618 the subject was not specified, though surely many of them were also religious. As in other parts of Spain, the percentage of secular paintings was higher in the collections of the nobility and the clergy, with religious painting increasing proportionally further down the social scale, until it was almost the only genre present in the inventories of farmers and workers in general.^[38]

The arrival of Herrera the Younger in Seville and the reception of the full Baroque

*Saint Anthony of Padua*, 1656, oil on canvas, Seville Cathedral. In the opinion of A. E. Pérez Sánchez, the picture marks Murillo's "definitive turn" toward the full Baroque style.

In 1655 Francisco de Herrera the Younger arrived in Seville from Madrid, after a probable stay of some years in Italy. Shortly after his arrival he painted the Triumph of the Sacrament for Seville Cathedral, with the novelty of its large figures placed against the light in the foreground and the fluttering child angels treated with fluid and almost transparent brushwork in the distance. His influence is immediately noticeable in the Saint Anthony of Padua, a large picture that Murillo painted for the baptismal chapel of the cathedral only a year later. The clear separation of the celestial and earthly spaces traditional in Sevillian painting, with its balanced composition and monumental figures, is decisively broken here, emphasizing the diagonal by placing the opening of glory off to the left. The saint, on the right, stretches his arms toward the figure of the Christ Child, who appears isolated against a brightly lit background. The distance between them underlines the intensity of the saint's feelings and his expectant longing. The saint is placed in a dim interior space that opens onto a gallery, creating a second source of strong light with which the painter achieves admirable spatial depth and avoids the violent contrast between an illuminated sky and an earth in shadow, unifying the spaces by means of a diffuse and vibrant light in which some angels in the foreground are also seen against the light.^[39]^[40]

The very evolution of his painting made this rapid assimilation of Herrera's novelties possible. From the same year 1655, completed in August when they were installed in the cathedral sacristy, comes the pair of Sevillian saints formed by Saint Isidore and Saint Leander, paid for by the wealthy Canon Juan Federigui. Being monumental figures, larger than life because they were to be placed high on the walls, they appear bathed in a silvery light that produces brilliant highlights on the white tunics, achieved with a technique of thick and fluid brushwork.^[41] The Lactation of Saint Bernard and the Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonsus, both in the Museo del Prado, of disputed date and unknown origin, may be from around the same time. The pictures are first recorded in the 1746 inventory of the Palace of La Granja as belonging to Isabel de Farnesio, who probably acquired them during the years the court stayed in Seville. Given their size, more than three meters high and of similar dimensions, they can be assumed to be altarpieces, although the church for which they were painted is unknown, as is whether the provenance is the same for both, as seems to be the case. They still show the taste for chiaroscuro lighting and monumental figures, with a sober composition and decorative details in which echoes of Juan de Roelas have been noted, mainly in the canvas of Saint Bernard, although Murillo's treatment of the accessories is more naturalistic than his model's. At the same time, however, the subtle handling of light, especially in the most intensely illuminated areas, anticipates the lyrical treatment of matter that would characterize his later work.^[42]

Two important ensembles, whose commissions have not been documented, could also belong to this period because of their rich sense of color and the placement of some figures against the light: the three monumental canvases devoted to the life of John the Baptist, of which it is known only that in 1781 they hung in the refectory of the convent of Augustinian nuns of San Leandro in Seville, which sold them in 1812, and which are now dispersed among museums in Berlin, Cambridge and Chicago; and the series of the Prodigal Son (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland), of which four ricordi, or reduced-format replicas of loose execution, possibly painted as mementos or to serve as models for later developments, are preserved in the Museo del Prado.^[43] On this occasion Murillo's compositions are inspired by a series of eleven prints by Jacques Callot, gathered under the title La vie de l'enfant prodigue (1635), but Murillo adapted Callot's inventions to his own pictorial style and to the Sevillian setting of the time in the clothing and physiognomies of his protagonists. This historical approach is especially noteworthy in the canvas called The Prodigal Son Leading a Dissolute Life, which has been seen as a contemporary genre scene with all the elements of a bodegón and other skillfully resolved naturalistic details, such as the figure of the musician who, placed against the light, enlivens the banquet, the little dog peeking out from under the tablecloth, or the generous necklines of the ladies adorned in brightly colored clothes and with restrained eroticism.^[44]

Years of plenitude

In 1658 he spent a few months in Madrid. The reasons for this trip and what he did during his stay in the city are unknown, but it may be supposed that, encouraged by Herrera, he wished to see the latest novelties in painting being practiced at the court. On his return to Seville he devoted himself to founding an academy of drawing, whose first session took place on 2 January 1660 in the Casa Lonja. Its aim was to allow both masters of painting and sculpture and young apprentices to perfect their anatomical drawing of the nude, for which the academy would provide practice with a live model, paid for by the masters, who also covered the cost of firewood and candles, since the sessions took place at night. Murillo was its first co-president, together with Herrera the Younger, who left that same year for Madrid to settle permanently at the court.^[45] In November 1663 he still took part in the session that agreed on the drafting of the academy's constitutions, but by then he had already left its presidency, since the documentation shows Sebastián de Llanos y Valdés at its head. According to Palomino, who always praises Murillo's gentle character and modesty, he would have left it and established a private academy in his own house, so as not to have to deal with the haughty character of Juan de Valdés Leal, who was elected president next and who "wanted to be alone in everything".^[46]

Also from that year, 1660, is one of the most significant and admired works of his production: the Birth of the Virgin in the Musée du Louvre, painted as an overdoor for the Chapel of the Concepción Grande in the Seville cathedral. In the center, beneath a small opening of glory, a group of matrons and angels in a descending composition indebted to Rubens gather joyfully around the newborn, from whom a source of light emanates, intensely illuminating the foreground and fading toward the background. In this way he creates atmospheric effects in the side scenes, set further back and with their own light sources: on the left, Saint Anne in a bed beneath a canopy, her dim lighting contrasting with that of the chair placed against the light in the foreground, and on the right, two maidens drying the swaddling clothes at the fire of a hearth. This carefully studied hierarchy of lights reminds critics such as Diego Angulo of Dutch painting, and specifically of the painting of Rembrandt, which Murillo could have known through prints or even through the presence of some of his works in Sevillian collections, such as that of Melchor de Guzmán, Marquis of Villamanrique, who is known to have owned a painting by Rembrandt that he exhibited publicly in 1665 on the occasion of the inauguration of the church of Santa María la Blanca.^[47]

Dutch and Flemish influences have also been pointed out in his landscapes, already praised by Palomino, who remarked on them: "not to be omitted is the celebrated skill that our Murillo had in landscapes". Apart from a few pure landscapes of doubtful attribution, such as the Landscape with a Waterfall in the Museo del Prado, these are landscape backgrounds in narrative compositions. The finest examples of this kind are the four surviving canvases of the series of stories of Jacob that he painted for the Marquis of Villamanrique, displayed on the façade of his palace during the festivities for the consecration of the church of Santa María la Blanca in 1665 and probably painted around 1660.^[48] Palomino, mistaking the subject, since he speaks of stories from the life of David, relates that the Marquis of Villamanrique commissioned the landscapes from Ignacio de Iriarte, a specialist in the genre, and the figures from Murillo, but that when the painters argued over which of them should do his part first, Murillo, annoyed, told him "that if he thought he needed him for the landscapes, he was mistaken: and so he alone made those paintings with stories and landscapes, something as marvelous as it was his own; which the said Lord Marquis brought to Madrid".^[49]

*Jacob Laying the Peeled Rods before the Flocks of Laban*, c. 1660–1665, oil on canvas, 213 x 358 cm, Dallas, Meadows Museum. The canvas, part of a series of stories from the life of Jacob, shows Murillo's skill in creating landscapes.

The series, which originally must have consisted of five pictures, of which only four are known, was in Madrid in the 18th century in the possession of the Marquis of Santiago, and by the beginning of the 19th century it had already been dispersed. Today two of its stories are in the Hermitage Museum, those depicting Isaac Blessing Jacob and Jacob's Ladder, and the other two are in the United States: Jacob Searching for the Household Idols in Rachel's Tent, in the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Jacob Laying the Peeled Rods before the Flock of Laban, owned by the Meadows Museum in Dallas. The broad landscapes, especially in these last two, arranged around a central motif and opening onto a distant luminous background against which the hazy outlines of the mountains stand out, suggest familiarity with Flemish landscape painters such as Joos de Momper or Jan Wildens,^[50] and perhaps also with the Italian landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, his exact contemporary, while the attention paid to the livestock, abundant in both pictures, seems to refer to Orrente, reinterpreted in the Sevillian's rich manner.^[39] With absolute naturalism, in Jacob Laying the Peeled Rods before the Flock of Laban Murillo depicted even the mating of the sheep alluded to in the biblical text (Genesis, 30, 31), which for reasons of decorum was hidden under overpainting, probably as early as the 19th century, only to come to light again in the 20th.^[48]

The great commissions

The series of paintings for Santa María la Blanca

Shortly before the death of Pope Urban VIII in 1644, a decree of the Roman Congregation of the Holy Office, which was in the hands of the Dominicans, prohibited applying the term immaculate to the conception of Mary rather than directly to the Virgin, in the way its supporters had shifted from conception of the Immaculate Virgin to Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The decree was not made public and only began to become known when the Holy Office censured some books on that ground. When the news reached Seville, the cathedral chapter responded by hanging a painting of the Immaculate Conception by Murillo with the inscription "Conceived without sin", and the city itself appealed to the Cortes of Castile in 1649, requesting the intervention of the King. Nothing changed during the pontificate of Innocent X, but when Alexander VII was raised to the papal throne in 1655, Philip IV redoubled his efforts to obtain the annulment of the decree and the approval of the feast of the Immaculate Conception as it had been celebrated in Spain. After numerous efforts by the Spanish envoys, on 8 December 1661 Pope Alexander VII promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, which, although not yet the dogmatic definition some hoped for, proclaimed the antiquity of the pious belief, admitted its feast, and affirmed that few Catholics now rejected it. The constitution was received with enthusiasm in Spain, and great festivities were held everywhere, of which numerous artistic testimonies remain.^[51]

Paintings for the church of Santa María la Blanca

The Dream of the Patrician.

The Patrician John and His Wife before Pope Liberius.

Painted between 1662 and 1665, the two lunettes more than 5 meters wide that decorated the central nave, now in the Museo del Prado, narrate the founding of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, or Santa María de las Nieves, the dedication of the Sevillian church.

To commemorate the apostolic constitution, the parish priest of the church of Santa María la Blanca, Domingo Velázquez Soriano, decided to undertake a remodeling of the church, a former synagogue, whose works were paid for in part by the canon Justino de Neve, probably the one who commissioned from Murillo four pictures to decorate its walls. The works, which transformed the old medieval building into a spectacular Baroque church, began in 1662 and were completed in 1665, when the church was inaugurated with solemn festivities described in detail by Fernando de la Torre Farfán in Fiestas que celebró la iglesia parroquial de S. María la Blanca, Capilla de la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana, y patriarchal de Sevilla: en obseqvio del nvevo breve concedido por N. Smo. Padre Alexandro VII en favor del pvrissimo mysterio de la Concepción sin culpa Original de María Santiisima. Nuestra Senóra, en el Primero Instante physico de su ser, published the following year in Seville. Farfán describes the church, on whose walls Murillo's paintings were already hanging, and the ephemeral decorations installed in the square in front of the church, where an altarpiece was set up on a temporary stage with at least three other paintings by Murillo owned by Neve: a large Immaculate Conception in the central niche, flanked by the Good Shepherd and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.

Murillo's pictures, in lunette form, depicted stories of the founding of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome in the two largest, placed in the central nave and lit by the skylights of the dome, and the Immaculate Conception and the Triumph of the Eucharist in the two smaller ones, placed at the heads of the side aisles. All four left Spain during the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain, and only the first two, destined for the Musée Napoléon, were returned in 1816, later entering the Museo del Prado, while the other two, after successive sales, belong to the Musée du Louvre, in the case of the Immaculate Conception, and to a private English collection, in the case of the Triumph of the Eucharist.

The first two in particular are masterpieces. In the Dream of the Patrician John and His Wife Murillo depicts the moment when the Virgin appears to them in their dreams in the month of August to ask them to dedicate a church on the spot they will see traced in snow on the Esquiline Hill. Instead of showing them asleep in bed, Murillo imagines them overcome by sleep, he leaning on the table covered with a red cloth, on which rests, closed, the thick book he has been reading, and she on a cushion, according to the custom of the time, with her head drooping over her interrupted needlework. Even a little white dog sleeps curled up on itself. The descending composition heightens the sense of relaxation. The half-light that pervades the scene, broken by the halo surrounding Mary and the Child, is nuanced by the lights that subtly pick out each detail of the composition and, together with the fluid and blurred treatment of the contours, create the space in which the figures placidly rest.^[52]

The story continues with the presentation of the Patrician John and His Wife before Pope Liberius. Murillo divides the scene, placing on the left the patrician and his wife before the Pope, who has had the same dream, and depicting on the right, sketched in the distance, the procession heading to the hill to verify the content of the dreams, in which Pope Liberius reappears beneath the canopy. The main scene is set in a broad space of classical architecture lit from the left. The light falls mainly on the woman and the cleric accompanying her, creating a contre-jour against which the figure of the Pope, possibly portrayed with the features of Alexander VII, stands out against the bare architecture. The same taste for contre-jour is found in the procession, painted with light, almost sketchy brushwork, where the spectators in the foreground appear as shapes plunged in shadow, thus highlighting the luminosity of the procession itself.^[53]

Paintings for the Capuchin church of Seville

After some paintings made around 1664 for the convent of San Agustín, notably the one depicting Saint Augustine Contemplating the Virgin and Christ Crucified (Museo del Prado), between 1665 and 1669 he painted, in two stages, 16 canvases for the church of the Capuchin convent of Seville, intended for its high altarpiece, the altarpieces of the side chapels, and the choir, for which he painted an Immaculate Conception. After the Mendizábal confiscation of 1836 the pictures passed to the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, except for the Jubilee of the Portiuncula, which occupied the center of the high altarpiece and is now in the Wallraf–Richartz Museum in Cologne. According to Pérez Sánchez, the repertoire of saints in this ensemble includes some of the "capital works of his best period".^[39] The paired figures of Saint Leander and Saint Bonaventure and of Saints Justa and Rufina, which occupied the sides of the first tier of the altarpiece, have the character so typical of the painter, of lively portraits and deep humanity in their serene and melancholic expressions. The Sevillian saints, accompanied by some finely made ceramic pots alluding to their trade as potters and to their martyrdom, hold a model of the Giralda in memory of the earthquake of 1504, during which, according to tradition, they prevented its fall by embracing it; but their presence in the altarpiece is due to the fact that the church had been built on the site of the old amphitheatre where they had been martyred. Saint Leander also alluded to the history of the church, since tradition held that he had built a convent on that site before the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which he now allegorically hands over to Saint Bonaventure, whom, contrary to his usual iconography, Murillo depicted bearded, since it was a Capuchin convent, and holding the model of a Gothic church, probably copied from an engraving, to signify its antiquity.^[54]

In the pictures devoted to Franciscan saints—Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Felix of Cantalice—but especially in Saint Francis Embracing Christ on the Cross, which is among the painter's most popular pictures, the softness of light and color, harmonizing without violence the brown of the Franciscan habit with the greenish backgrounds or with the naked body of Christ, intensifies the intimate character of their mystical visions, stripped of all drama. Highly representative of the painter's evolution is the Adoration of the Shepherds, painted for the altar of a side chapel. Compared with earlier versions of the same subject, such as the one in the Museo del Prado from around 1650, of strict naturalistic observance, it clearly reveals the novelty these paintings represent in their light brushwork and in the use of light to create space, by means of contre-jour, as opposed to the chiaroscuro and tight modeling of his early works.^[55]

Saint Thomas of Villanova, the picture the painter called "his Canvas", originally placed in the first chapel on the right, well exemplifies the degree of mastery the painter reached in this series. Thomas of Villanova, although an Augustinian and not a Franciscan, had recently been canonized by Alexander VII, and as Archbishop of Valencia he had been noted for his spirit of almsgiving, which Murillo highlights by showing him surrounded by beggars whom he is helping, next to a table with an open book whose reading he has abandoned, thus signifying that theological knowledge without charity is nothing. The scene unfolds in an interior of sober classical architecture and notable depth, marked by the alternation of lit and shaded spaces. A monumental column in the middle ground, against the light, makes it possible to create a luminous halo around the head of the saint, whose stature is enhanced by the crippled beggar kneeling before him, with a carefully studied foreshortening of his naked back. Equally studied are the contrasting psychologies of the beggars being helped, from the stooped old man who raises his hand to his eyes with a gesture of astonishment or disbelief, the old woman looking on with a sullen expression, and the boy with ringworm waiting imploringly, to the child in the lower left corner of the canvas, highlighted against the light, who shows his mother, with radiant joy, the coins he has received.^[56]

The series of the works of mercy for the Hospital de la Caridad

Paintings for the church of the Hospital de la Caridad stolen by Soult in 1810

Abraham and the Three Angels, Ottawa, National Gallery.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, Washington, National Gallery of Art.

The Healing of the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, London, National Gallery.

Saint Peter Freed by the Angel, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum.

Between 1666 and 1670 Murillo painted "six hieroglyphs that explain six of the works of Mercy" for the new church that the Brotherhood of Charity, which the painter had joined in 1665, was building at the instigation of Miguel de Mañara. In 1672 he delivered two further altar paintings, the only ones which, together with two of the hieroglyphs of the works of mercy, remain in their original place.

The Brotherhood of Charity, founded according to legend in the mid-15th century by Pedro Martínez, a prebendary of the cathedral, to bury executed criminals, began its activity shortly before 1578, when the brothers rented from the Crown the chapel of San Jorge in the Reales Atarazanas (Royal Shipyards); its first Rule, which set the burial of the dead as the brotherhood's purpose, dates from that year. For years it led a languid existence, to the point that in 1640 the chapel was in ruins and the brothers decided to demolish it and begin building a new one, whose completion would be delayed for more than 25 years. The plague of 1649 brought about its revitalization with the arrival of new brothers, but it was the entry of Miguel Mañara, heir to a wealthy merchant family of Corsican origin, and his election as elder brother in December 1663 that drove the completion of the works on the church. To these were added the conversion of a warehouse of the Atarazanas into a hospice and the reform of the brotherhood itself, which would now also aim to take in vagrants and feed them in its hospice, which became a dispensary for incurables, and to gather up abandoned sick people and carry them, on the brothers' shoulders if necessary, to hospitals where they would be cared for.^[57]

Mañara was in all probability the author of the decorative program, which followed a coherent narrative discourse, and was responsible for choosing the artists: Murillo and Valdés Leal, in charge of the painting, Bernardo Simón de Pineda for the architecture of the altarpieces, and Pedro Roldán in charge of the sculpture. The minutes of the brotherhood's meeting of 13 July 1670, recorded in the Libro de Cabildos, report on what had been done up to that point and clarify its meaning:

Likewise our elder brother Don Miguel de Mañara proposed that, the work on our church being finished and there having been placed in it, with the grandeur and beauty that can be seen, six hieroglyphs that explain six of the works of Mercy, the work of burying the dead, which is the principal one of our Institute, having been reserved for the main Chapel.^[58]

The "hieroglyphs" mentioned there, illustrations of the works of mercy, can be identified with the six pictures by Murillo that, according to the descriptions of Antonio Ponz and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, hung on the walls of the nave of the church below the cornice, forming another of the capital series of the painter's mature period. Four of them were stolen by Marshal Soult during the War of Independence and are now dispersed among different museums; only the two largest, in horizontal format, which were placed in the transept, remain in their place. Their subjects, each related to a work of mercy, are: The Healing of the Paralytic (London, National Gallery), visiting the sick; Saint Peter Freed by the Angel (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), ransoming captives; Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, in situ, feeding the hungry; The Return of the Prodigal Son (Washington, National Gallery of Art), clothing the naked; Abraham and the Three Angels (Ottawa, National Gallery), sheltering the pilgrim; and Moses Striking Water from the Rock of Horeb, in situ, giving drink to the thirsty. Ceán Bermúdez commented on them:

Those who grant Murillo nothing more than beauty of color may observe in the back of the paralytic at the pool how well he understood the anatomy of the human body: in the three angels who appear to Abraham, the proportions of man: in the heads of Christ, Moses, the father of the family and other personages, the nobility of the characters: the expression of the soul in the figures of the Prodigal son (...) and finally they will see in these excellent pictures the rules of composition, perspective and optics put into practice, as well as the philosophy with which he showed the virtues and passions of the human heart.^[59]

Diego Angulo highlighted, besides the painter's ability not to repeat himself and his mastery of gesture in the secondary figures, whose varied reactions deepen the narrative content, the breadth of the architectural space depicted in the porticoes of the probatic pool, where notable effects of aerial perspective are achieved through light and the gradual blurring of forms.^[60] In the two largest canvases, the most complex in composition and number of figures, he nevertheless also drew on outside inspiration: debts have been pointed out, for the Moses, to a canvas of the same subject by the Genoese Gioacchino Assereto, which was well known in Seville and is now in the Museo del Prado, and to Herrera the Elder for the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, both reinterpreted with his own particular sensibility.^[61]

The cycle of the works of mercy commissioned from Murillo was completed by the sculptural group of the Entombment of Christ executed by Pedro Roldán, which, since it represented the most important charitable work at the origin of the institution, burying the dead, occupied the high altarpiece. Apart from this series, in 1672 the brotherhood paid for four further paintings delivered by Murillo and Valdés Leal that year, whose subjects completed the message of the earlier series in accordance with the concerns and meditations of Mañara, expressed in his Discurso de la verdad.

Those four canvases, topped with semicircular arches, were on the one hand the famous "hieroglyphs of the Last Things" by Valdés Leal, placed at the foot of the nave, near the entrance of the church, reminding those who entered of the transience of earthly goods and the nearness of divine judgment, in which the scales could tip toward salvation through the exercise of the works of mercy shown in the earlier series; but since all the motifs of that series had been taken from the Bible, Murillo's two new pictures, placed on the altars of the nave, offered the brothers models of charity with which they could more easily identify, because their protagonists were closer to them: Saint John of God and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Healing the Sick with Ringworm, both still in their place. Both served as examples, to a heroic degree, of the new charitable practices that Mañara had entrusted to the brotherhood, involving himself personally and directly in the exercise of charity, as he expected the brothers to do: carrying the sick beggars on their shoulders if necessary, wherever they found them, as the Granadan John of God had done, or cleaning their wounds without turning their faces away "however ulcerated and loathsome he may be",^[62] of which the holy Hungarian queen was an example. And this is how Murillo showed his sick beggars, even dwelling on the realistic and unpleasant rendering of the sores, which did not fail to provoke some criticism when the picture of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary arrived in Paris, carried off by French troops. Shortly afterwards, in France itself, it would receive as much criticism as praise for the ability of the Spaniards to combine the sublime and the vulgar.^[63]

Other religious iconographies

The Immaculate Conception

Some twenty pictures of the Immaculate Conception painted by Murillo are known, a figure surpassed only by José Antolínez, which has led him to be regarded as the painter of Immaculate Conceptions, an iconography he did not invent but which he renewed in Seville, where the devotion was deeply rooted.

The earliest of the known examples is probably the so-called Concepción Grande (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes), painted for the Franciscan church, where it hung high above the arch of the main chapel, which explains the corpulence of its figure. On technical grounds it can be dated close to 1650, when the transept of the church was rebuilt after a collapse. Already in this first approach to the theme Murillo broke decisively with the static quality that characterized the Sevillian Immaculate Conceptions, always faithful to the models established by Pacheco and Zurbarán. Possibly influenced by Ribera's Immaculate Conception for the Discalced Augustinian nuns of Salamanca, which he could have known through an engraving, Murillo endowed it with vigorous dynamism and a sense of ascent through the movement of the cloak. The Virgin wears a white tunic and a blue mantle, in accordance with the vision of the Portuguese Beatriz de Silva recalled by Pacheco in his iconographic instructions, but Murillo dispensed entirely with the other Marian attributes that abounded, for didactic purposes, in earlier representations, and from the traditional iconography of the apocalyptic woman he retained only the moon beneath her feet and the "garment of the sun", understood as the amber-colored atmospheric background against which the Virgin's silhouette stands out. On a pedestal of clouds supported by four child cherubs, and with the landscape reduced to a narrow misty strip, the image of Mary alone was enough for Murillo to express her immaculate conception.^[51]^[64]

Murillo's second approach to the Immaculist theme is also related to the Franciscans, the great defenders of the mystery, and is strictly speaking a portrait, that of Fray Juan de Quirós, who in 1651 published Glorias de María in two volumes. The picture, of large dimensions and now in the Archbishop's Palace of Seville, was commissioned from Murillo in 1652 by the Brotherhood of the Vera Cruz, which had its seat in the convent of San Francisco. The friar is portrayed before an image of the Immaculate Conception, accompanied by angels carrying the symbols of the litanies, and he pauses in his writing to look at the viewer, seated at a table on which rest the two thick volumes he wrote in honor of Mary. The back of the friar's chair, overlapping the gilded border that frames the image, subtly reveals that the sitter is before a painting and not in the real presence of the Immaculate, a picture within the picture framed by columns and festoons with garlands. The model of the Virgin, with her hands crossed on her breast and her eyes raised, is already the one the painter would recreate, without ever repeating himself, in his very numerous later versions.^[65]

In the Immaculate Conception painted for the church of Santa María la Blanca, already mentioned, he also included portraits of devotees of the mystery. Torre Farfán identified among them the parish priest, Domingo Velázquez, who may have suggested to the painter the complex theological content of this canvas and of its companion, the Triumph of the Eucharist. The two are linked and are explained by the texts inscribed on the phylacteries painted in them: "in principio dilexit eam" (In the beginning [God] loved her), a text formed from the opening words of Genesis and a verse from the Book of Wisdom (VIII, 3), which accompanies the image of the Immaculate Conception; and "in finem dilexit eos, Joan Cap. XIII", accompanying the allegory of the Eucharist, words taken from the account of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John: "Jesus, knowing that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father, having loved his own, loved them to the end". The Immaculate Conception, whose dogmatic definition its defenders demanded, was thus associated with the Eucharist, a central element of Catholic doctrine: the same manifestation of love for mankind that had moved Jesus, at the end of his days on earth, to become incarnate in the bread had preserved Mary from sin before all time. And although Murillo was probably given both the subjects and the inscribed texts, it is worth remembering that Sevillian painters, on entering the academy of drawing, had to swear an oath of fidelity to the Blessed Sacrament and to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.^[51]

The Immaculate Conception of Santa María la Blanca otherwise follows a prototype the painter created around 1660 or a little later, the years to which the so-called Immaculate Conception of El Escorial (Museo del Prado) belongs, one of the painter's most beautiful and best known, in which he used an adolescent model, younger than in his other versions. The undulating outline of the figure, with the cloak barely detached from the body in a diagonal direction, and the harmony of the blue and white of the dress with the silvery gray of the clouds below the faintly golden radiance surrounding the figure of the Virgin, are features found in all his later versions, up to what is probably the last: the Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables, also called the Soult Immaculate Conception (Museo del Prado), which may have been commissioned in 1678 by Justino de Neve for one of the altars of the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville. Despite the picture's considerable size, the Virgin appears smaller here, as the number of little angels fluttering joyfully around her increases considerably, anticipating the delicate taste of the Rococo. Taken out of Spain by Marshal Soult, at a time when it was considered, according to Ceán Bermúdez, "superior to all others by his hand", it was acquired by the Musée du Louvre in 1852 for 586,000 gold francs, the highest price paid for a painting up to that time. Its later entry into the Museo del Prado came about as a result of an agreement signed in 1940 between the Spanish government and the French government of Philippe Pétain, when the painter's reputation was at a low ebb; it was exchanged, together with the Lady of Elche and other works of art, for a copy of Velázquez's portrait of Mariana of Austria, then owned by the Museo del Prado, which at that time was considered the original version of the portrait.^[66]

The Christ Child and the Infant Saint John

*The Good Shepherd*, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 123 x 101 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

The Virgin and Child as an isolated, full-length figure is another of the themes Murillo treated frequently. These are generally small works, probably intended for private oratories. Most of the surviving examples were painted between 1650 and 1660, with a technique that is still chiaroscurist and, regardless of their devotional character, with a marked naturalistic sense of feminine beauty and childish grace. The influence of Raphael, known through engravings, undoubtedly accounts for the elegance of the slender, youthful models of his Virgins, as well as the delicate expression of maternal feelings that makes unnecessary the other symbols more typical of medieval religiosity, which could still be found in the compositions of Francisco de Zurbarán on the same subject. At the same time, the influence of Flemish painting, well represented in Seville, can be seen in the rich treatment of the draperies, as in some of the versions of which a larger number of old copies exist, such as the Virgin of the Rosary with the Child in the Museo del Prado or the Virgin and Child in the Palazzo Pitti, in which the tender expression of the Virgin and the playful attitude of the Child are combined with a rich range of pink and blue pastel tones, anticipating Rococo taste.^[67]

With the same naturalistic spirit he treated other motifs from the cycle of the childhood of Christ, such as the Flight into Egypt (Detroit Institute of Arts) or the Holy Family (Prado; Derbyshire, Chatsworth House). The painter's interest in childhood themes and the very evolution of Baroque sentimentality would also become evident in the isolated figures of the Christ Child asleep on the cross or blessing, and of the infant Baptist, or San Juanito, among which one might recall the version in the Museo del Prado, a late work datable to around 1675 and one of the painter's most widely reproduced, in which the Child, with a mystical gesture, and the lamb accompanying him are drawn with fluid brushwork against a silvery landscape of dissolving outlines.

Of the old theme of the Good Shepherd, which Murillo interpreted in a childlike version, three versions are known. What is probably the earliest, in the Museo del Prado, painted around 1660, shows the Child resting one hand on the lost sheep, upright, looking at the viewer with a somewhat melancholy air, seated in a bucolic landscape of classical ruins, which makes it an effective devotional image. A later version, in London, Lane Collection, with Jesus standing and leading the flock, leaves more room for the pastoral landscape, and the Child's face, now turned toward the sky, gains in expressiveness. Its former companion piece, the Infant Saint John and the Lamb in London, National Gallery, in which the little Baptist appears smiling as he embraces the lamb with childish freshness, attracted the attention of Gainsborough, who may have owned a copy and taken inspiration from it for his Boy with a Dog in the Alfred Beit collection. The last version of this theme (Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut), executed with remarkable freedom of brush and soft colors, already belongs to the painter's final years, with a sense of beauty that is more markedly sweet and delicate. The Children of the Shell in the Museo del Prado, where the Christ Child and the infant Saint John appear together as if at play, is, like the previous ones, a devotional image aimed at simple piety, but delivered with a refined pictorial technique, and enormously popular.^[68]^[69]

Themes of the Passion

In Murillo's painting, scenes of martyrdom, although not entirely absent—Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, Museo del Prado—are very rare. Far more frequent are devotional and pious images that allow him to dwell on the emotional aspects of the subject depicted, stripped of all narrative context, which is also how he would approach the themes of the Passion of Christ.^[70]

The Ecce homo as an isolated figure, paired with the Dolorosa following the model of Titian, is the most frequently repeated of the Passion images, whether as a bust (Museo del Prado), half-length (New York, Hecksecher Museum, c. 1660–70; El Paso, El Paso Museum of Art, c. 1675–82), or full-length and seated (Madrid, private collection), as the one that formed a pair with the Dolorosa in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla may have been.^[71] Another recurring iconography is that of Christ after the Flagellation (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, c. 1665–1670, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), a subject not found in the Gospels but widely treated by preachers, who liked to offer the Christian, for its expressive force, the contemplation of the helpless and bruised Redeemer modestly gathering up the garments scattered about the room, as an example of humility and meekness.

Related to this, the theme of Christ at the Column with Saint Peter in tears, which invites meditation on the need for repentance and on the sacrament of forgiveness, has a notable example in Murillo's production, both because of the client for whom it was painted, the canon Justino de Neve, and because of the rich and rare material used as its support: a sheet of obsidian from Mexico. The small piece was listed in the inventory of Neve's possessions drawn up at his death as a pair with a Prayer in the Garden painted on the same material, and both were acquired at his estate auction by the surgeon Juan Salvador Navarro, from whom they passed to Nicolás de Omazur (Louvre).^[72]

In the images of Christ on the Cross the models followed are Flemish engravings and not the iconographic instructions of Francisco Pacheco. Christ is generally depicted already dead, with the lance wound in his side and fastened to the wood with three nails. They are usually small pieces, sometimes painted on small wooden crosses, as if intended for private devotion, and, just as Martínez Montañés had done in the Cristo de los cálices, an image of great devotion in Seville, the traces of martyrdom are toned down so that an excess of blood does not hinder the contemplation of the beautiful figure of Christ.^[73]

The secular genres

Genre painting

Murillo's extensive production also includes around 25 genre pictures, mainly, though not exclusively, with childhood motifs. The earliest information on almost all of them comes from outside Spain, which suggests that they were painted on commission for some of the Flemish merchants settled in Seville, who were also clients for religious paintings, as Nicolás de Omazur, an important collector of the painter's works, may have been, and intended for the northern market, perhaps as a secular counterpart to the scenes of the childhood of Jesus.^[74] Some of them, such as the Boys Playing Dice in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, were already listed under Murillo's name in an inventory drawn up in Antwerp in 1698, and at the beginning of the 18th century they were acquired by Maximilian of Bavaria for the Bavarian royal collection.

The influences he may have received from the Danish painter Eberhard Keil, who arrived in Rome in 1656, and from the Dutch bamboccianti are not, moreover, sufficient to explain Murillo's approach to the genre, which, in the scale of its figures, set in limited landscape backgrounds—but in any case larger than in the painting of Keil, who fills the space with his figures—and in the choice of its subjects, purely anecdotal and rendered with spontaneous joy, creates a genre painting without precedent, born of the naturalistic spirit of its time and of the attraction child psychology held for the painter, also evident, as already noted, in his religious painting.^[75]^[76]

Although their protagonists are usually beggar children or children of humble families, poorly dressed and even ragged, his figures always convey optimism, since the painter seeks out the happy moment of play or of the snack they are enjoying. The loneliness and air of commiseration with which he portrayed the Boy Delousing Himself in the Musée du Louvre, which on account of its technique and treatment of light can be dated to around 1650 or somewhat earlier, would disappear in the later works, which date from 1665 to 1675. The comparison, already proposed by Diego Angulo, between the Louvre's Boy Delousing Himself and another picture of similar subject but later date, depicting a Grandmother Delousing Her Grandson, in the Munich Pinakothek, illustrates the change of attitude: the notes of sadness and loneliness have completely disappeared, and what attracts the painter is the childish spirit always ready for play, portraying the boy busy with a crust of bread and distracted by the little dog playing between his legs while the grandmother sees to his hygiene, perhaps translating into painting the old saying, "a child with lice is healthy and beautiful".^[77] That childish joy is the absolute protagonist of another small-format canvas, painted with lively and sketchy brushwork, in the National Gallery in London, the so-called Laughing Boy Leaning out of a Window, with no anecdote other than the simple broad smile of the boy leaning out of the window, from which he sees something that makes him laugh but which is hidden from the viewers of the picture.^[77] It can also be seen in the work in the Russian Hermitage, Boy with a Dog.

Pictures such as Two Boys Eating from a Pie Dish and Boys Playing Dice—a game disapproved of by moralists—, both in the Munich Pinakothek, although they may also have been inspired by sayings or picaresque tales that have not been identified, seem to have no other intention than to portray, in a kindly tone, groups of children who show their joy at play or eating greedily, and who manage to survive with their limited resources thanks to the vitality their very youth gives them. Similar in tone, but perhaps with more narrative content, are the two in the Dulwich Picture Gallery: Invitation to a Game of Pelota a Pala, which reflects the hesitation of a boy sent on an errand when another, of roguish appearance, invites him to join the game; and the so-called Three Boys or Two Urchins and a Black Boy, whose slight anecdote allows the painter to contrast various psychological reactions to an unexpected event: a Black boy with a jug on his shoulder, in whom Murillo might have portrayed Martín, his dark-skinned Black slave, born around 1662, comes up to where two other boys are about to have their snack and, with a friendly gesture, asks them for a piece of the pie they are going to eat, to which one of them reacts with amusement, while the one holding the pie tries to hide it in his hands with a fearful gesture.^[78]

With the same kindly and anecdotal tone, drawn to the dispossessed and to simple people with their spontaneous reactions, in Two Women at a Window (Washington, National Gallery of Art) he probably portrayed a brothel scene, as has been pointed out since the 19th century.^[79] The so-called Girl with Flowers in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, sometimes regarded as a genre painting and mistaken for a flower seller, fits the allegorical genre better and can be interpreted as a representation of Spring, whose companion piece may be the personification of Summer in the form of a youth wearing a turban and ears of wheat, recently acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland.^[80] These could be the two pictures representing those seasons of the year that Nicolás de Omazur acquired from the estate of Justino de Neve, and they would not be the only allegories painted by Murillo, since Omazur also owned a picture, whose whereabouts are now unknown, devoted to Music, Bacchus and Love.^[81]

Portraits

Although relatively few in number, the portraits painted by Murillo are spread throughout his career and display a notable formal variety, which was probably not unrelated to the taste of his clients. That of the canon Justino de Neve (London, National Gallery), seated at his desk, with a lapdog at his feet and before an elegant architectural background opening onto a garden, conforms perfectly to the models of Spanish portraiture, with the emphasis placed on the dignity of the sitter. Full-length portraits such as that of Don Andrés de Andrade in the Metropolitan in New York or the Gentleman with a Golilla in the Museo del Prado show the double influence of Velázquez and Anthony van Dyck, which he would display again with remarkable mastery, fluid brushwork and sobriety of color in the portrait of Don Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara (Madrid, collection of the Dukes of Alba), one of the painter's last works, precisely dated 1680, when the sitter, a canon of the cathedral, was 25 years old.

The portraits of Nicolás de Omazur (Museo del Prado) and of his wife Isabel de Malcampo—known only through a copy—, half-length and set within an illusionistic frame, reflect by contrast a more specifically Flemish and Dutch taste, both in their format and in their allegorical content, showing her holding flowers and him a skull, symbols typical of vanitas painting, with its rich northern tradition. This is also the format chosen for his two self-portraits: a more youthful one, made to look as if painted on a slab of marble in the manner of a classical relief, and the one in the National Gallery in London, painted for his children, set within an oval frame in the manner of a trompe-l'œil and accompanied by the tools of his trade.

Highly unusual and unrelated to all these models is the Portrait of Don Antonio Hurtado de Salcedo, also called The Hunter (c. 1664, private collection), a large-format portrait because it was intended to occupy a place of honor in the house of its client, later Marquis of Legarda, whom it shows in the middle of a hunt, frontally and upright, with his shotgun resting on the ground, accompanied by a servant and three dogs. Nothing in it recalls the portraits Velázquez painted of members of the royal family in hunting dress; on the contrary, it seems closer to certain works by Carreño, with a possible Van Dyckian influence.^[82]^[83]

Last works and death

After the series for the Hospital de la Caridad, which was splendidly paid, Murillo received no new commissions of that scale. A new cycle of bad harvests led to the famine of 1678, and two years later an earthquake caused serious damage. The Church's resources were devoted to charity, and the embellishment of churches was postponed. Even so, Murillo did not lack work, thanks to the patronage of his old friends, such as the canon Justino de Neve and the foreign merchants established in Seville, who commissioned from him both devotional works for their private oratories and genre scenes. Nicolás de Omazur, who arrived in Seville in 1656 at the age of fourteen, came to own as many as 31 works by Murillo, some as significant as The Wedding at Cana in Birmingham, Barber Institute. Another of these merchants fond of the painter was the Genoese Giovanni Bielato, established in Cádiz around 1662. Bielato died in 1681, leaving to the Capuchin convent of his native city the seven pictures by Murillo from different periods that he owned, now dispersed among various museums. Among them was a new horizontal-format version of the subject of Saint Thomas of Villanova Giving Alms (London, The Wallace Collection, c. 1670), with a new and admirable repertoire of beggars. He also left the Capuchins of Cádiz a sum of money, which they used for the painting of the altarpiece of their church, commissioned from Murillo.^[81]

The legend of his death, as related by Antonio Palomino, is connected precisely with this commission, since he supposedly died as a result of a fall from the scaffolding while painting the large picture of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Cádiz convent itself. The fall, Palomino maintained, caused him a hernia which, "out of his great modesty", he would not allow to be examined, and from which he died a short time later.^[84] The truth is that the painter began working on this picture without leaving Seville at the end of 1681 or the beginning of 1682, and death overtook him on 3 April of that year. Only a few days earlier, on 28 March, he had still taken part in one of the bread distributions organized by the Brotherhood of Charity, and his will, in which he named as executors his son Gaspar Esteban Murillo, a cleric, Justino de Neve and Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio, is dated in Seville on the very day of his death.^[85]^[86] In it he declared that he was in debt to Nicolás de Omazur, to whom he had delivered two small canvases worth sixty pesos on account of the hundred that Omazur had given him, and that he was leaving unfinished two devotional canvases, one of Saint Catherine commissioned by Diego del Campo, for which he had already received the agreed 32 pesos, and another, half-length, of Our Lady, commissioned by a weaver "whose name I do not remember", in addition to the large canvas of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine for the high altar of the Capuchins of Cádiz, of which he was able to complete only the drawing on the canvas and begin applying color to the three main figures. Its completion was entrusted to his pupil Francisco Meneses Osorio, to whom the remaining canvases of the altarpiece, all preserved in the Museum of Cádiz, are entirely due.^[87]^[88]

Disciples and followers

In the last decades of the 17th century Murillo's gentle and serene painting, with its models of Virgins and saints imbued with a sweet and delicate sentimentality, prevailed in Seville over the more decidedly Baroque and dramatically tinged painting of Valdés Leal, and its influence filled a good part of Sevillian painting in the following century. It was, however, a superficial influence, centered on the imitation of models and compositions, and none of his followers attained the master's command of light and loose drawing or the luminosity and transparency of color characteristic of him. Of his direct disciples, the best known and closest is Francisco Meneses Osorio, who completed the work Murillo had barely begun on the altarpiece of the Capuchins of Cádiz.^[89] An independent painter from 1663, in his more personal works the more conservative influence of Zurbarán can be seen alongside that of Murillo. The same is true of Cornelio Schut, who probably arrived in Seville already trained as a painter, and by whom some drawings very close to those of Murillo are known. His oil paintings, however, never rise above the modest and show a variety of influences. A singular personality is that of Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio, a friend rather than a disciple and a knight of the Order of Malta, which allowed him to come into contact with the painting of Mattia Preti. Nevertheless, his pictures with childhood subjects (Children Playing Dice, Museo del Prado) scarcely recall those of the master except in their theme, for he departed from him both in composition, always more crowded in the disciple, and in technique, in which he used brushstrokes heavily loaded with paint.^[90]^[91]

Linked to Murillo's painting, though the degree of personal relationship cannot be specified, were Jerónimo de Bobadilla, Juan Simón Gutiérrez and Esteban Márquez de Velasco, by whom some works of a certain quality, strongly influenced by the master, have survived, and the Granada-born Sebastián Gómez, around whom a legend was woven making him Murillo's "slave painter," probably in order to draw a parallel with Velázquez and Juan de Pareja.^[92] With Alonso Miguel de Tovar and Bernardo Lorente Germán, the painter of the Divine Shepherdesses, Murillo's influence extended into the first half of the 18th century.^[93] Both of them, together with Domingo Martínez, Murillesque in his taste for the delicate and the tender, served the court during its stay in Seville from 1729 to 1733, a moment of glory for Murillo's painting given the fondness for it shown by Queen Elisabeth Farnese, who bought as many works as she could, among them a large part of those by his hand now preserved in the Museo del Prado. By that time none of his genre paintings remained in Seville, and Palomino wrote, with a certain dismay, since what was valued was the sweetness of the color rather than the drawing, that "thus today, outside Spain, a painting by Murillo is esteemed more than one by Titian or by Van Dyck. So powerful is the flattery of coloring in winning popular favor!"^[94]

Reception and critical assessment

Paintings by Murillo are documented from early dates in Flemish and German collections, mainly genre scenes such as Children Eating Grapes and Melon, in Antwerp possibly from 1658, and Children Playing Dice, documented in 1698 in the same city, where both pictures were acquired for Maximilian II. Also before the end of the century some of his works reached Italy, in this case of a religious nature, donated by the merchant Giovanni Bielato, and England, taken there by a certain Lord Godolphin who in 1693 is said to have bought at a high price the picture titled Children of Morella, probably the one now known as Three Boys, auctioned with the collection of the English minister plenipotentiary in Rome.^[95] But the decisive impulse for the wider spread of his fame came from the first biography devoted to the painter, included in the 1683 Latin edition of the Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae by the painter and theorist Joachim von Sandrart, who only mentioned Velázquez, whose portraits had astonished the Romans, and devoted a biography to José de Ribera, but included him among the Italians, so that Murillo was the only Spaniard with a biography of his own, illustrated moreover with his self-portrait. In reality, except for the fact of his birth in Seville and the year of his death, nothing in Sandrart's biography was true, but it showed the high esteem in which he held him by placing him on the level of the Italian painters, as a "new Paolo Veronese," and by imagining his burial accompanied by most solemn obsequies, with the coffin carried by "two marquises and four knights of various orders, accompanied by an innumerable crowd."^[96]

In contrast, and although Antonio Palomino asserted that an Immaculate Conception by Murillo had been exhibited in Madrid in 1670, causing general astonishment, and that Charles II had summoned him to the court, which the painter is said to have declined because of his advanced age, none of his paintings had entered the royal collections when their inventory was drawn up in 1700.^[97] It was precisely the biography that Palomino devoted to him, published in 1724, that, despite some inaccuracies, would provide the best basis for the subsequent knowledge and appreciation of the artist. In it he reported the high prices his works fetched abroad, which may have influenced the acquisition of seventeen works by the painter by Elisabeth Farnese during the court's stay in Seville between 1729 and 1733.

Mengs, First Painter to King Charles III and a theorist of painting, judged Murillo's painting to be of two different styles, the first of greater strength because it kept close to nature, and the second of greater "sweetness." Although for him Velázquez was already a superior painter, Murillo's prestige continued to grow throughout the 18th century and with it the export of his works, to the point that in 1779 an order was issued, signed by the Count of Floridablanca, which expressly prohibited the sale of his pictures to foreign buyers, since "it had come to the notice of the King [...] that some foreigners buy in Seville all the paintings they can acquire by Bartolomé Murillo, and by other celebrated painters, in order to take them out of the Kingdom."^[98] The order added that those who wished to sell works by the painter could in any case apply to the King to offer them for sale so that they might thus be incorporated into the royal collections, but the effects of this provision must have been very limited, for only three of his works were incorporated into the Crown's holdings in this period, one of them, a Penitent Magdalene now in the museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, seized at the customs house of Ágreda when an attempt was made to export it illegally.^[99]

A good example of the interest aroused by Murillo's painting in England during the 18th century is the self-portrait of the painter William Hogarth with his dog, inspired by the Sevillian's self-portrait, and the copies of Murillo's works made by Gainsborough, who came to own a Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness now considered a workshop piece.^[100] Murillo's influence, moreover, is evident in what Joshua Reynolds called fancy pictures, genre scenes featuring children, generally beggars, frequent above all in Gainsborough's last years of activity (Girl with Dog and Pitcher in the Bleit collection, Blessington) and, to some extent, also present in the painting of Reynolds himself.^[101]

Murillo's reception in France came later, as he was passed over in silence by André Félibien. However, already in the 18th century some of his works reached the country, among them two genre paintings owned by the Countess of Verrue and four religious works acquired for the Louvre by Louis XVI together with the Young Beggar, and it would be there that the painter's popularity reached its culminating point, in the 19th century, after the departure of many of his works destined for the Musée Napoléon. Marshal Jean de Dieu Soult seized numerous works by the painter in Seville, fourteen of them for his own collection, many of which never returned to Spain. When his collection was auctioned in Paris in 1852, 586,000 francs were paid for the work known as the Soult Immaculate Conception, the highest price paid for a painting up to that time. Other important lots of paintings by Murillo came up for auction in Paris and London with the collections of the banker Alejandro María Aguado and of Louis Philippe I, highly valued after its exhibition in the Louvre's Spanish Gallery between 1838 and 1848. Among those in France who appreciated and praised Murillo's work was the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, who copied his Saint Catherine, a model of feminine beauty, just as the Realist Henri Fantin Latour would leave his personal version of the Beggar Boy (Castres, Goya Museum). With Théophile Gautier Murillo would be consecrated as the "painter of heaven," while Velázquez was the painter of earth, although there was no lack of critics who, like Louis Viardot, accused the painter of falling excessively into vulgarity with his far from idealized popular types.

Jacob Burckhardt, after visiting the Spanish Gallery of the Louvre, would regard him as one of the greatest artists of all time, admirable for the realism of his canvases in which "beauty remains a piece of nature," but also for his "curious idealism," considering the London Self-Portrait superior to the portraits by Velázquez. "In Murillo, beauty is still a fragment of nature, and not a meditation that has passed through numerous reflections," he wrote.^[102] After him, Carl Justi, the great biographer of Velázquez, and Wilhelm von Bode upheld the painter's prestige in Germany in the second half of the 19th century, when his fame was beginning to decline, as critics accused him of being a cloying painter, excessively sweet and lacking in dramatic tension, as well as a propagandist for the Catholic religion.^[103]

Much of the responsibility for this decline in critical esteem lay with the many very poor-quality copies made of his works on all kinds of supports, from devotional prints and calendars to chocolate boxes, forgetting to judge him, according to Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, in "his milieu and his time," a task to which, in the 20th century, August L. Mayer and Diego Angulo Íñiguez, among others, would devote themselves, tracing a biography of the painter based on documentation and stripped of myths, while the latter presented in 1980, on the eve of the third centenary of his death, the refined catalog of his complete works.^[99]

References

Notes

↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 220.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 101, text by Ellis Waterhouse.
↑ Sandrart, Joachim von, Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae..., Nuremberg, Froberg, 1683, p. 393. Copy digitized by Münchener Digitalisierungs Zentrum.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 349.
↑ López Gutiérrez, Antonio J.; Ortega López, Aurora J. "Los Esteban Murillo: una familia de feligreses en la Parroquia de Santa María Magdalena". In Beltrán Martínez, Lidia; Quiles García, Fernando (ed.). Cartografía Murillesca - Año de Murillo MMXVII - Los Pasos Contados (PDF) (in español). p. 46. Retrieved 29 November 2018.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Navarrete Prieto, El joven Murillo, p. 17.
↑ Hereza (2017), pp. 159 and 207.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), pp. 16-19.
↑ Hereza (2017), pp. 29-30. The license to travel to America granted by the Casa de Contratación to his sister María Murillo and her husband, after the corresponding examination of purity of blood, declared them "Old Christians clean of any bad race of Moors or Jews, neither penanced by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, nor of the new converts to the holy Catholic faith, nor of those prohibited from passing to the Indies".
↑ Hereza (2017), pp. 23 and 34-35.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 55 and 106.
↑ Navarrete Prieto, El joven Murillo, pp. 202-205.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 410.
↑ Commercial dealings of various kinds with the New World, in which Murillo advanced or lent money, are documented at different moments of his later career; see Kinkead (2006), pp. 355, 356, 361-362, etc. Some of these commercial activities may have been at the origin of the painter's brief imprisonment for debts in October 1655: see Hereza (2017), pp. 76-77.
↑ ^15.0 ^15.1 Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 411.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, pp. 410-411.
↑ Bennasar y Vincent, España. Los Siglos de Oro, p. 194.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», pp. 43-45 and 51.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 45.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 47.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 50.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 222.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 224.
↑ Hereza, (2017), p. 48.
↑ Kinkead (2006), pp. 365-366. In her will, declaring herself the lawful wife of Bartolomé Murillo and calling herself "Dª Beatriz de Sotomayor y Cabrera", she named as heirs her children José Esteban Murillo, aged fourteen, Francisca Murillo, aged nine, Gabriel Murillo, aged eight, Gaspar Esteban, aged two, and "María Morillo (sic), as I wish her to be called, aged 15 days". She also declared that she did not know how to write.
↑ Murillo, Gabriel (Pintor). Archived 15 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine In Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Accessed 2 December 2013.
↑ On the removal and dispersal of the series, see Ignacio Cano Rivero, «Conjuntos desaparecidos y dispersos de Murillo: la serie para el Claustro Chico del convento de San Francisco de Sevilla», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), (2009), pp. 69-93.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 57 and 112.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 58.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 349-350.
↑ Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 22-26. See also, in the same collective work, the iconographic study by Odile Delenda, «El Claustro Chico del convento Casa Grande de San Francisco», pp. 211-219.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 350-351.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 116.
↑ Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 260-267.
↑ Hereza (2017), p. 67.
↑ Stratton, Suzanne, «La Inmaculada Concepción en el arte español», Cuadernos de Arte e Iconografía, Revista de la Fundación Universitaria Española (1988), vol. I, 2., chap. III, "La Inmaculada Concepción durante el reinado de Felipe III".
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», pp. 45 and 52.
↑ Martín Morales, Francisco Manuel, «Aproximación al estudio del mercado de cuadros en la Sevilla barroca (1600-1670)», Archivo Hispalense, vol. 69, no. 210, 1986, pp. 137-160.
↑ ^39.0 ^39.1 ^39.2 Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 352.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp 58-60.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp 136-138.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 142-144.
↑ Cenalmor, Elena, «Serie del Hijo pródigo [h. 1655-1660]», in Portús(2021), pp 121-126.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), pp 97-101.
↑ Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 19.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 444.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 60.
↑ ^48.0 ^48.1 Murillo (1617-1682), p. 170.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, pp. 417-418.
↑ Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 118.
↑ ^51.0 ^51.1 ^51.2 Stratton, Suzanne, «La Inmaculada Concepción en el arte español», Cuadernos de Arte e Iconografía, Revista de la Fundación Universitaria Española (1988), vol. I, 2., chap. IV, "La Inmaculada Concepción durante el reinado de Felipe IV".
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 61-63 and 180.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 181.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 63 and 188-190.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 63-65.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 66 and 192.
↑ Brown, Imágenes e ideas... pp. 179-185.
↑ Cited in Brown, Imágenes e ideas... p. 197.
↑ Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España, Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda de Ibarra, 1800, vol. II, pp. 52-53.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 67-69.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 358.
↑ Brown, Imágenes e ideas... pp. 201-202.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 70.
↑ Valdivieso, Murillo, pp. 203-204.
↑ Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 205.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 166 and 248.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 122-126.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 73, 103, 158 and 176.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), pp. 164-172.
↑ Ayala Mallory, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, p. 33.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), pp 178-180 and 358.
↑ Finaldi (2012), Catalogue, nos. 13-14, pp. 130-135, entries signed by Elena Cenalmor Bruqetas.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), p. 183
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 104.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), p. 73.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 359.
↑ ^77.0 ^77.1 Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 73-74.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 228-235. The catalogue text actually called the Black slave Juan, said to have been born in 1657. Murillo had male and female slaves in his domestic service; one of the latter, Juana de Santiago, a criada morena (dark-skinned maidservant), as she was recorded in the 1650 census (Hereza, 2017, p. 227), did indeed give birth to a boy in 1657, but he was baptized Felipe, with Martín Atienza, a pupil of the painter, as godfather (Hereza, 2017, p. 337), and he died before reaching the age of four, in July 1661 (Hereza, 2017, p. 366). Another son of Juana, named Tomás, must have been born around 1656, according to the document by which Murillo, bearing him goodwill because he had been raised in his house, granted him his freedom on condition that he leave Seville, after he had been involved in some incident for which he was in prison. The letter of manumission, issued in September 1676, described him as "white, of good build, curly hair and aged nineteen to twenty years" (Hereza, 2017, p. 480). Martín was indeed Black, "a captive slave subject to servitude and taken in good war and not in peace", aged about eighteen, as stated in 1680 in the document by which Murillo sold the young slave to the arbitrista Rodrigo Díaz de Noreña for 736 reales (Hereza, 2017, p. 511).
↑ Brown (1982-1983), pp. 35-43, suggested erotic interpretations both for this and for some other genre scenes, such as the Old Woman Delousing a Boy or, above all, the so-called Group of Figures in Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, a "libidinous painting" whose protagonists, he asserted, are a prostitute and a procuress. In Brown (1990), p. 279, reaffirming this interpretation, he explained that "at first glance, the eroticism of Murillo's composition seems moderate, but the view of the boy's buttocks through a hole in his breeches suggests certain forbidden sexual practices that obviously excited some of the artist's clients". Valdivieso (2002), pp. 353-359, for his part, rejected such suggestions with indignation, mistakenly asserting that pederasty was prosecuted in Seville by the Inquisition, and admitted only that the protagonists of Two Women at a Window might indeed be two "courtesans", but without this in any case meaning "that this scene contains an incitement to sexual or carnal contact".
↑ Valdivieso (2002), p. 356.
↑ ^81.0 ^81.1 Brown (1990), p. 278.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 360-361.
↑ Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 74, 174, 224 and 252.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 417.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), pp. 23-24.
↑ Kinkead (2006), pp. 375 ff., reproduces Murillo's will together with the inventory of his possessions drawn up by the executors and the results of the auction.
↑ Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 201.
↑ Hereza (2017), p. 540.
↑ Ayala Mallory, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, p. 31.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 362-363.
↑ Serrera-Valdivieso, La época de Murillo, pp. 14-16.
↑ García Felguera, La fortuna de Murillo, pp. 175-179.
↑ Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 417-422.
↑ Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 412.
↑ Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), p. 111.
↑ Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 98-99.
↑ Valdivieso (2010), p. 36.
↑ Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 97 and 99.
↑ ^99.0 ^99.1 Valdivieso (2010), pp. 37 and 285.
↑ Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 111-112.
↑ García Felguera, La fortuna de Murillo, pp. 46-47.
↑ Burkhardt, Jakob (2009). "Sobre Murillo (1842)" (PDF). Ensayistas alemanes del siglo XIX Una antología (in español). Universidad de Buenos Aires. Retrieved July 6, 2020.
↑ Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 97, 100 and 108-109.

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Serrera Contreras, Juan Miguel; Valdivieso González, Enrique (1982). La época de Murillo. Antecedentes y consecuentes de su pintura (in español). Seville: Artes Gráficas Padura. Depósito Legal SE-225-1982.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
Valdivieso, Enrique (1990). Murillo. Sombras de la tierra, luces del cielo (in español). Madrid: Sílex. ISBN 84-7737-029-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
Valdivieso, Enrique (2002). "A propósito de las interpretaciones eróticas en pinturas de Murillo de asunto popular". Archivo Español de Arte (in español). LXXV (300).
Valdivieso, Enrique (2010). Murillo. Catálogo razonado de pinturas (in español). Madrid: El Viso. ISBN 978-84-95241-77-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, on the website of the Museo del Prado.
Portrait of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo with an epitome of his life included in the book Retratos de Españoles ilustres, published in 1791.
Art critic Santiago Amón discusses the work of Murillo for RTVE
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in the database of the Movable Heritage of Andalusia. Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage
Digitized works of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain

[1] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 220.

[2] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 101, text by Ellis Waterhouse.

[3] Sandrart, Joachim von, Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae..., Nuremberg, Froberg, 1683, p. 393. Copy digitized by Münchener Digitalisierungs Zentrum.

[4] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 349.

[5] López Gutiérrez, Antonio J.; Ortega López, Aurora J. "Los Esteban Murillo: una familia de feligreses en la Parroquia de Santa María Magdalena". In Beltrán Martínez, Lidia; Quiles García, Fernando (ed.). Cartografía Murillesca - Año de Murillo MMXVII - Los Pasos Contados (PDF) (in español). p. 46. Retrieved 29 November 2018.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

[6] Navarrete Prieto, El joven Murillo, p. 17.

[7] Hereza (2017), pp. 159 and 207.

[8] Valdivieso (2010), pp. 16-19.

[9] Hereza (2017), pp. 29-30. The license to travel to America granted by the Casa de Contratación to his sister María Murillo and her husband, after the corresponding examination of purity of blood, declared them "Old Christians clean of any bad race of Moors or Jews, neither penanced by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, nor of the new converts to the holy Catholic faith, nor of those prohibited from passing to the Indies".

[10] Hereza (2017), pp. 23 and 34-35.

[11] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 55 and 106.

[12] Navarrete Prieto, El joven Murillo, pp. 202-205.

[13] Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 410.

[14] Commercial dealings of various kinds with the New World, in which Murillo advanced or lent money, are documented at different moments of his later career; see Kinkead (2006), pp. 355, 356, 361-362, etc. Some of these commercial activities may have been at the origin of the painter's brief imprisonment for debts in October 1655: see Hereza (2017), pp. 76-77.

[Palomino411-15] 15.0 ^15.1 Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 411.

[16] Palomino, El museo pictórico, pp. 410-411.

[17] Bennasar y Vincent, España. Los Siglos de Oro, p. 194.

[18] Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», pp. 43-45 and 51.

[19] Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 45.

[20] Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 47.

[21] Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», p. 50.

[22] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 222.

[23] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 224.

[24] Hereza, (2017), p. 48.

[25] Kinkead (2006), pp. 365-366. In her will, declaring herself the lawful wife of Bartolomé Murillo and calling herself "Dª Beatriz de Sotomayor y Cabrera", she named as heirs her children José Esteban Murillo, aged fourteen, Francisca Murillo, aged nine, Gabriel Murillo, aged eight, Gaspar Esteban, aged two, and "María Morillo (sic), as I wish her to be called, aged 15 days". She also declared that she did not know how to write.

[26] Murillo, Gabriel (Pintor). Archived 15 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine In Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Accessed 2 December 2013.

[27] On the removal and dispersal of the series, see Ignacio Cano Rivero, «Conjuntos desaparecidos y dispersos de Murillo: la serie para el Claustro Chico del convento de San Francisco de Sevilla», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), (2009), pp. 69-93.

[28] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 57 and 112.

[29] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 58.

[30] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 349-350.

[31] Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 22-26. See also, in the same collective work, the iconographic study by Odile Delenda, «El Claustro Chico del convento Casa Grande de San Francisco», pp. 211-219.

[32] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 350-351.

[33] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 116.

[34] Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 260-267.

[35] Hereza (2017), p. 67.

[36] Stratton, Suzanne, «La Inmaculada Concepción en el arte español», Cuadernos de Arte e Iconografía, Revista de la Fundación Universitaria Española (1988), vol. I, 2., chap. III, "La Inmaculada Concepción durante el reinado de Felipe III".

[37] Murillo (1617-1682), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, «La Sevilla de Murillo», pp. 45 and 52.

[38] Martín Morales, Francisco Manuel, «Aproximación al estudio del mercado de cuadros en la Sevilla barroca (1600-1670)», Archivo Hispalense, vol. 69, no. 210, 1986, pp. 137-160.

[PerezSanchez_1-39] 39.0 ^39.1 ^39.2 Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 352.

[40] Murillo (1617-1682), pp 58-60.

[41] Murillo (1617-1682), pp 136-138.

[42] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 142-144.

[43] Cenalmor, Elena, «Serie del Hijo pródigo [h. 1655-1660]», in Portús(2021), pp 121-126.

[44] Valdivieso (2010), pp 97-101.

[45] Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 19.

[46] Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 444.

[47] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 60.

[Murillo170-48] 48.0 ^48.1 Murillo (1617-1682), p. 170.

[49] Palomino, El museo pictórico, pp. 417-418.

[50] Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 118.

[Stratton-51] 51.0 ^51.1 ^51.2 Stratton, Suzanne, «La Inmaculada Concepción en el arte español», Cuadernos de Arte e Iconografía, Revista de la Fundación Universitaria Española (1988), vol. I, 2., chap. IV, "La Inmaculada Concepción durante el reinado de Felipe IV".

[52] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 61-63 and 180.

[53] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 181.

[54] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 63 and 188-190.

[55] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 63-65.

[56] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 66 and 192.

[57] Brown, Imágenes e ideas... pp. 179-185.

[58] Cited in Brown, Imágenes e ideas... p. 197.

[59] Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España, Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda de Ibarra, 1800, vol. II, pp. 52-53.

[60] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 67-69.

[61] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 358.

[62] Brown, Imágenes e ideas... pp. 201-202.

[63] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 70.

[64] Valdivieso, Murillo, pp. 203-204.

[65] Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 205.

[66] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 166 and 248.

[67] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 122-126.

[68] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 73, 103, 158 and 176.

[69] Valdivieso (2010), pp. 164-172.

[70] Ayala Mallory, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, p. 33.

[71] Valdivieso (2010), pp 178-180 and 358.

[72] Finaldi (2012), Catalogue, nos. 13-14, pp. 130-135, entries signed by Elena Cenalmor Bruqetas.

[73] Valdivieso (2010), p. 183

[74] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 104.

[75] Murillo (1617-1682), p. 73.

[76] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, p. 359.

[Murillo_1-77] 77.0 ^77.1 Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 73-74.

[78] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 228-235. The catalogue text actually called the Black slave Juan, said to have been born in 1657. Murillo had male and female slaves in his domestic service; one of the latter, Juana de Santiago, a criada morena (dark-skinned maidservant), as she was recorded in the 1650 census (Hereza, 2017, p. 227), did indeed give birth to a boy in 1657, but he was baptized Felipe, with Martín Atienza, a pupil of the painter, as godfather (Hereza, 2017, p. 337), and he died before reaching the age of four, in July 1661 (Hereza, 2017, p. 366). Another son of Juana, named Tomás, must have been born around 1656, according to the document by which Murillo, bearing him goodwill because he had been raised in his house, granted him his freedom on condition that he leave Seville, after he had been involved in some incident for which he was in prison. The letter of manumission, issued in September 1676, described him as "white, of good build, curly hair and aged nineteen to twenty years" (Hereza, 2017, p. 480). Martín was indeed Black, "a captive slave subject to servitude and taken in good war and not in peace", aged about eighteen, as stated in 1680 in the document by which Murillo sold the young slave to the arbitrista Rodrigo Díaz de Noreña for 736 reales (Hereza, 2017, p. 511).

[79] Brown (1982-1983), pp. 35-43, suggested erotic interpretations both for this and for some other genre scenes, such as the Old Woman Delousing a Boy or, above all, the so-called Group of Figures in Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, a "libidinous painting" whose protagonists, he asserted, are a prostitute and a procuress. In Brown (1990), p. 279, reaffirming this interpretation, he explained that "at first glance, the eroticism of Murillo's composition seems moderate, but the view of the boy's buttocks through a hole in his breeches suggests certain forbidden sexual practices that obviously excited some of the artist's clients". Valdivieso (2002), pp. 353-359, for his part, rejected such suggestions with indignation, mistakenly asserting that pederasty was prosecuted in Seville by the Inquisition, and admitted only that the protagonists of Two Women at a Window might indeed be two "courtesans", but without this in any case meaning "that this scene contains an incitement to sexual or carnal contact".

[80] Valdivieso (2002), p. 356.

[Brown1990_1-81] 81.0 ^81.1 Brown (1990), p. 278.

[82] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 360-361.

[83] Murillo (1617-1682), pp. 74, 174, 224 and 252.

[84] Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 417.

[85] Valdivieso (2010), pp. 23-24.

[86] Kinkead (2006), pp. 375 ff., reproduces Murillo's will together with the inventory of his possessions drawn up by the executors and the results of the auction.

[87] Valdivieso, Murillo, p. 201.

[88] Hereza (2017), p. 540.

[89] Ayala Mallory, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, p. 31.

[90] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 362-363.

[91] Serrera-Valdivieso, La época de Murillo, pp. 14-16.

[92] García Felguera, La fortuna de Murillo, pp. 175-179.

[93] Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, pp. 417-422.

[94] Palomino, El museo pictórico, p. 412.

[95] Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), p. 111.

[96] Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 98-99.

[97] Valdivieso (2010), p. 36.

[98] Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 97 and 99.

[Valdivieso2010_1-99] 99.0 ^99.1 Valdivieso (2010), pp. 37 and 285.

[100] Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 111-112.

[101] García Felguera, La fortuna de Murillo, pp. 46-47.

[102] Burkhardt, Jakob (2009). "Sobre Murillo (1842)" (PDF). Ensayistas alemanes del siglo XIX Una antología (in español). Universidad de Buenos Aires. Retrieved July 6, 2020.

[103] Hellwig, Karin, «La recepción de Murillo en Europa», in Navarrete-Pérez Sánchez (dir), pp. 97, 100 and 108-109.

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Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

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Contents

Life and work

Training and early years

Seville in the 17th century

First commissions

From 1649 to 1655: the impact of the plague

The arrival of Herrera the Younger in Seville and the reception of the full Baroque

Years of plenitude

The great commissions

The series of paintings for Santa María la Blanca

Paintings for the Capuchin church of Seville

The series of the works of mercy for the Hospital de la Caridad

Other religious iconographies

The Immaculate Conception

The Christ Child and the Infant Saint John

Themes of the Passion

The secular genres

Genre painting

Portraits

Last works and death

Disciples and followers

Reception and critical assessment

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links

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Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Born	December 1617 (1617-12) Seville
Died	April 1682(1682-04-00) (aged 64) Seville
Occupation	Painter

Anonymous

Search

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Life and work

Training and early years

Seville in the 17th century

First commissions

From 1649 to 1655: the impact of the plague

The arrival of Herrera the Younger in Seville and the reception of the full Baroque

Years of plenitude

The great commissions

The series of paintings for Santa María la Blanca

Paintings for the Capuchin church of Seville

The series of the works of mercy for the Hospital de la Caridad

Other religious iconographies

The Immaculate Conception

The Christ Child and the Infant Saint John

Themes of the Passion

The secular genres

Genre painting

Portraits

Last works and death

Disciples and followers

Reception and critical assessment

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links

Navigation

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