Bartolome Esteban Murillo
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Seville, baptized January 1, 1618 – April 3, 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Trained in late naturalism, he evolved towards formulas typical of the full baroque with a sensitivity that sometimes anticipates the rococo in some of its most peculiar and imitated iconographic creations, such as the Immaculate Conception or the Good Shepherd as a child. A central personality of the Sevillian school, with a large number of disciples and followers who carried his influence well into the 18th century, he was also the best-known and most appreciated Spanish painter outside of Spain, the only one of whom Sandrart included a brief and fabled biography in his Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae of 1683 with the Self-portrait of the painter engraved by Richard Collin. Conditioned by his clientele, the bulk of his production is made up of works by religious character destined for churches and convents in Seville as well as for private devotion, but unlike other great Spanish masters of his time he also cultivated genre painting continuously and independently throughout a good part of his career.
Life and work
Murillo must have been born in the last days of 1617, as he was baptized in the parish of Santa María Magdalena in Seville on January 1, 1618. He was the youngest of fourteen siblings, sons of the barber Gaspar Esteban and María Pérez Murillo, who came from a family of silversmiths and had a painter among his close relatives. In accordance with the lawless usage of the time, although he once signed Esteban he commonly adopted his mother's second surname. His father was a well-to-do barber, surgeon and bleeder who is sometimes referred to as a bachelor, and who in a 1607 document was said to be "rich and thrifty", a tenant of some real estate next to the church of Saint Paul whose rights Bartholomew inherited and provided him with income for most of his life. At the age of nine and within six months he was orphaned of father and mother and was placed under the guardianship of one of his older sisters, Ana, also married to a barber-surgeon, Juan Agustín de Lagares. The young Bartholomew must have maintained good relations with the couple, since he did not change his address until his marriage, in 1645, and in 1656 his brother-in-law, now a widower, appointed him as testamentary executor.
Training and early years
There is hardly any documentary news of the first years of Murillo's life and his training as a painter. It is recorded that in 1633, when he was fifteen years old, he requested a license to go to America with some relatives, which is why he made a will in favor of a niece. According to the custom of the time, around those years or a little earlier he must have started his artistic formation. It is very possible that, as Antonio Palomino stated, he trained in the workshop of Juan del Castillo, married to one of the daughters of Antonio Pérez, Murillo's uncle and godfather at baptism and himself a painter of imagery. A discreet painter, characterized by Due to the dryness of the drawing and the friendly expressiveness of their faces, Castillo's influence can be seen clearly in what are probably the earliest of Murillo's preserved works, whose execution dates could correspond to 1638-1640: The Virgin delivering the rosary to Saint Dominic (Seville, Archiepiscopal Palace and former collection of the Count of Toreno) and The Virgin with Brother Lauterio, Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum), dry drawing and cheerful colouring.
According to Palomino, when he left Juan del Castillo's workshop sufficiently qualified to «support himself by painting at the fair (which was very prevalent at that time), he made a consignment of paints for cargo from the Indies; and having by this means acquired a piece of wealth, he went to Madrid, where with the protection of Velázquez, his countryman (...), he repeatedly saw the eminent paintings of the Palace". Although it is not improbable that, like other painters Sevillian, he painted devotional paintings for the lucrative American trade in his early days, there is no indication that he traveled to Madrid at this time, nor is it likely that he made the trip to Italy that Sandrart attributed to him and Palomino denied, after investigating the matter, according to what he said, with "exact diligence". For the rest, according to the Cordovan thought, the unfounded supposition of a trip to Italy was born from "that foreigners do not want to grant the laurel of Fame to any Spaniard in this art, if he has not gone through Italian customs: without noticing, that Italy has been transferred to Spain in statues, eminent paintings, prints, and books; and that the study of nature (with these antecedents) everywhere abounds".
Palomino, who had gotten to know him, although he did not deal with him, said he had heard from other painters that in his early years «he had been locked up in his house all that time studying from nature, and that in this way he had acquired the skill” with which, when exposing his first public works, painted for the Franciscan convent in Seville, he earned the respect and admiration of his countrymen, who until then knew nothing of his existence and progress in art. In any case, the style that manifests itself in his first important works, such as those paintings in the small cloister of the San Francisco convent, he was able to learn without leaving Seville in artists of the previous generation such as Zurbarán or Francisco de Herrera el Viejo..
Seville in the 17th century
Holding the monopoly of trade with the Indies and having an Audiencia, various courts of justice, among them the Inquisition, archbishopric, Casa de Contratación, Casa de Moneda, consulates and customs, Seville was at the beginning of the 17th century the "city paradigm". 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 Moors, when Murillo was born it was still a cosmopolitan city, the most populous of the Spanish and one of the largest on the European continent. From 1627 some symptoms of crisis began to be noticed due to the decrease in trade with the Indies, which slowly moved towards Cádiz, the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War and the separation from Portugal. But the greatest impact was produced by the plague epidemic of 1649, with devastating effects. The population was reduced by half, accounting for some 60,000 deaths, and it no longer recovered: large urban areas, especially in the popular parishes in the north, were left semi-deserted and their houses converted into lots.
Although the crisis affected different segments of the population unequally, the general standard of living declined. The popular classes, the ones most affected by it, staged a short-range riot in 1652 caused by famine, but in general terms charity worked as a palliative for injustice and misery that equally affected the beggars who flocked to the streets. doors of the episcopal palace, to receive the loaf of bread that the archbishop distributed daily, as well as to the hundreds of "shameful" poor people counted in each parish or in institutions specifically dedicated 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 godfather at the baptism of two of Murillo's sons. The painter, who was a devout man, as evidenced by his joining the Rosary Brotherhood in 1644, receiving the habit of the Venerable Third Order of San Francisco in 1662 and his frequent presence in the distribution of bread organized by the parishes to which he successively was attached, he also entered 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 to the nine convents for men and one for women that had been founded from the year of Murillo's birth to that date. Its nearly seventy convents were, without a doubt, more than enough for a city that had seen its population decrease so drastically; but the absence of new convent foundations did not put an end to the demand for works of art, as temples and monasteries continued to enrich themselves artistically by their own means or by donations from wealthy 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 in charge of refining the ingots and taking them to be worked at the Casa de la Moneda, were exclusive professionals from Seville; The officials of the Mint did not lack work either, at least for seasons, when the fleet arrived at port. And there was never a lack of merchants 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 commerce. Some had fully integrated into the city after making their fortune: Justino de Neve, protector of the church of Santa María la Blanca and the Hospital de Venerables, for which he commissioned some of his masterpieces from Murillo, came from one of those families from former Flemish merchants established in the city as early as the 16th century. Others joined the city at a later date: the Dutchman Josua van Belle and the Flemish Nicolás de Omazur, both of whom were portrayed by Murillo, arrived in the city after 1660. Cultured men As well as being wealthy, they had to travel to Seville with portraits and paintings from that source, which would explain the influence, among others, of Bartholomeus van der Helst in the portraits of the Sevillian. They were also in charge of spreading the fame of Murillo beyond the peninsula, especially Nicolás de Omazur whose friendship with the painter led him to commission, after his death, an engraving of the Self-portrait now kept at the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a laudatory text in Latin possibly written by himself, who in addition to being a merchant was known as a poet.
First commissions
In 1645 Murillo married Beatriz Cabrera Villalobos, from a family of well-to-do farmers from Pilas and niece of Tomás Villalobos, gold silversmith and relative of the Holy Office who will protect her when she moves to Seville. The couple had ten children, of which only five —the youngest of fifteen days— survived their mother, who died on December 31, 1663. Only one, Gabriel (1655-1700), transferred to the Indies in 1678, barely twenty years old, and who became Corregidor de Naturales de Ubaque (Colombia), seems to have followed the paternal office for which, to believe Palomino, he was subject to good pledges and "greater hopes".
The same year of 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. The paintings scattered after the War of the Independence, the series narrates with didactic purpose some rarely represented stories of saints of the Franciscan order, especially followers of the Spanish Observance to which the convent was attached. In the choice of his subjects, the accent was placed on the exaltation of the contemplative life and that of prayer, represented in the Saint Francis comforted by an angel, from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and The Kitchen of the Angels at the Louvre; Franciscan joy, exemplified in the San Francisco Solano and the bull (National Heritage, Real Alcázar de Sevilla), and love of neighbor, specifically reflected in the San Diego de Alcalá feeding to the poor (Royal Academy of San Fernando). With a strong naturalist accent, in the tradition of Zurbaranesque tenebrism, he collected in this last canvas a complete repertoire of popular types portrayed with peaceful dignity, carefully arranged in a simple composition of parallel planes cut out on a black background. In the center, around the cauldron, stands out a group of beggar children in which it is possible to appreciate the interest in children's themes that the painter will never abandon.
If 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 it is taken into consideration that Velázquez and Alonso Cano, from the same generation as the Extremaduran master, had abandoned tenebrism years ago. The attraction for chiaroscuro, however, will still be accentuated in some later work, although always within his early production, such as the Last Supper in the church of Santa María la Blanca, dated 1650. But along with this taste for intense and contrasting lighting, in some canvases of the same In the Franciscan series, novelties can be seen that, distancing him from Zurbarán, would explain the good reception given to the commission, even if it was modestly paid for: thus the diffuse celestial lighting that surrounds the procession of saints accompanying the Virgin in the horizontal canvas that represents The death of Santa Clara (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, dated 1646), where the figures of the saints also manifest the sense of beauty with which Murillo would accustom to portray the female characters, or the dynamism of the figures that populate the Kitchen of the Angels, where the layman Fray Francisco de Alcalá is represented in levitation and the angels busy at their tasks in the kitchen. However, along with these successes, there is also a certain clumsiness in the way of solving perspective problems in the series as a whole, and the use of Flemish prints as a source of inspiration is evident. To them is due in large part the dynamism of the angelic figures, taken mainly from the series of Angelorum Icones by Crispijn van de Passe. Other sources used, such as Rinaldo and Armida, an engraving by Pieter de Jode II of a composition by Anton van Dyck only two years before the Franciscan series was commissioned, show that Murillo could have been very aware of the latest news in painting.
From 1649 to 1655: the impact of the plague
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In the years immediately following the terrible impact of the plague in 1649, there are no known new commissions of that magnitude, but a large number of devotional images, among them some of the painter's most popular works, in which the interest Due to the chiaroscuro lighting, he distances himself from the Zurbaranesque due to the search for greater mobility and emotional intensity, when interpreting sacred themes with delicate and intimate humanity. The various versions of the Virgin with Child or the so-called Virgin of the Rosary (including those in the Castres Museum, the Pitti Palace and the Prado Museum), the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Holy Family with the Little Bird, both from the Prado Museum, the juvenile Penitent Magdalene from the National Gallery of Ireland and Madrid, collection Arango, or Detroit's Flight into Egypt, belong to this moment, in which he also addressed the issue of the Immaculate Conception for the first time in the so-called Great Conception or Concepción de los franciscanos (Seville, Museum of Fine Arts), with which he began the renewal of his iconography in Seville according to Ribera's model.
Also belonging to this moment, in the field of profane painting, is the Boy grooming himself or Young beggar in the Louvre Museum, the first known testimony of attention and dedication of the painter to popular motifs with child protagonists, in which a note of melancholic pessimism has been seen when showing the little porter deworming himself in solitude, a pessimism that he will completely abandon in later works of this genre, endowed with greater vitality. and joy. Of another order are the reappeared Old Spinner of Stourhead House, previously known only from a mediocre copy kept in the Prado Museum, and the Old Woman with Hen and Basket of Eggs (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which could have belonged to Nicolás de Omazur, genre paintings conceived almost as portraits for direct and immediate observation, although they also show the influence of Flemish painting through prints by Cornelis Bloemaert. Lastly mo, from 1650 is also the first documented portrait, that of Don Juan de Saavedra (Córdoba, private collection).
With its archbishop and its more than sixty convents, Seville in the 17th century was an important focus of religious culture. In it, popular religiosity, encouraged by ecclesiastical institutions, sometimes manifested itself vehemently. This was the case in 1615, when according to Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga and other chroniclers of the time, the entire city took to the streets to proclaim the conception of Mary without original sin in response to a sermon by a Dominican father in which he had manifested a " unpious opinion” in relation to the mystery. In their reparation, processions and tumultuous parties were held that year and the following ones, which were not lacking in blacks and mulattoes, and even "Moros y Moras", according to what was said, would have participated with their own party if they had been allowed. The plague of 1649 He also caused some devotions with titles as significant as those of the Christ of the Good Death or the Good End to be redoubled, and that brotherhoods such as that of the Dying were founded or renewed, whose objective was to provide the brothers with suffrage and a dignified burial. In this atmosphere of intense religiosity, the ecclesiastical clientele constituted only a part, and perhaps not the largest part, of the wide demand for religious paintings, which would explain the Murillo production of these years, destined for private clients and not for temples or convents. with the repetition of motifs and the existence of copies from the workshop, as is the case with the half-length Santa Catalina de Alejandría, whose original, known by several copies ias, is currently at the Focus-Abengoa Foundation in Seville. Numerous individuals took charge of the foundation or endowment of churches, convents and chapels, but also paintings or simple pictures of a religious subject could not be missing in any home, however modest it might be. A statistical study carried out on 224 Sevillian inventories between the years 1600 and 1670, with a total of 5,179 reviewed paintings, yields the figure of 1,741 paintings of religious subjects held by individuals, that is, slightly more than a third of the total; a few more, 1820, corresponded to secular painting of any genre and of the remaining 1618 the motive was not determined, but surely many of them would also be religious. As in other places in Spain, the percentage of secular paintings was higher in the collections of the nobility and the clergy, with religious painting increasing proportionally as one descended in the social scale, until it was almost the only genre present in the inventories of farmers and workers in general.
The arrival of Herrera el Mozo in Seville and the reception of the baroque plenum
In 1655 Francisco de Herrera el Mozo arrived in Seville, coming from Madrid after a probable stay of some years in Italy. Shortly after arriving, he painted the Triunfo del Sacramento of the Cathedral of Seville, with the novelty of its large figures placed against the light in the foreground and the fluttering of infant angels treated with fluid and almost transparent brushwork in the distances. His influence can be immediately seen in the San Antonio de Padua, a large painting 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 decidedly broken here, enhancing the diagonal, by placing the break in glory displaced to the left. The saint, on the right, extends his arms towards the figure of the Child Jesus, who appears isolated against a brightly illuminated background. The distance that separates them underlines the intensity of the saint's feelings and the expectant longing for him. The saint is located in an interior space that is dim, but open to a gallery that creates a second source of strong lighting with which it achieves an admirable spatial depth and avoids the violent contrast between an illuminated sky and a shadowy earth. unifying the spaces through a diffuse and vibrant light in which some angels in the foreground are also backlit.
The very evolution of his painting made this rapid assimilation of the Herrerian innovations possible. From the same year 1655, completed in August when they were placed in the sacristy of the cathedral, are the pair of Sevillian saints made up of San Isidoro and San Leandro, paintings paid for by the wealthy canon Juan Federigui. As they are monumental figures, larger than life because they are placed high up on the walls, they appear bathed in a silvery light that causes brilliant flashes in the white tunics achieved by a pasty and fluid brushstroke technique. Lactation of San Bernardo and the Imposition of the chasuble on San Ildefonso, both in the Museo del Prado, of controversial dating and unknown origin. The paintings are mentioned for the first time in the inventory of the Palacio de la Granja in 1746 as belonging to Isabel de Farnesio, probably acquired during the years the court was in Seville. Due to their size, more than three meters high and similar dimensions, they may be assumed to be altar paintings, although the church for which they were painted is unknown and whether the provenance, as it appears, is the same for both. The taste for chiaroscuro lighting and monumental figures can still be appreciated in them, with a sober composition and decorative details in which memories of Juan de Roelas have been noticed, mainly for the canvas of San Bernardo, although with a treatment of accessories more naturalistic in Murillo than in his model. But at the same time, the subtle use of light, especially in the most intensely illuminated areas, advances the lyrical treatment of matter that will be characteristic of his later work.
Two important ensembles, whose commissions have not been documented, could also belong to this moment due to their rich sense of color and the arrangement of some figures against the light: the three monumental canvases dedicated to the life of John the Baptist, from those that are only known to have hung in the refectory of the convent of the Augustinian nuns of San Leandro in Seville in 1781, sold by the convent in 1812 and currently scattered among the museums of Berlin, Cambridge and Chicago, and the series of the Son prodigal (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland), of which four ricordi or replicas in reduced format and undone invoice painted possibly as a souvenir or to serve as models for further developments, are preserved in the Museo del Prado. The Murillesque compositions are inspired on this occasion by a series of eleven prints by Jacques Callot, brought together under the title La vie de l'enfant prodigue (1635), but Murillo knew how to adapt the Callot's inventions to his own pictorial style and to the Sevillian environment of the moment in the clothes and physiognomies of his protagonists. This historical approximation is especially noteworthy in the canvas called The Prodigal Son Leads a Dissolute Life, in which a contemporary costumbrista scene has been seen with all the elements typical of a still life and other skilfully resolved naturalistic details, such as the figure of the musician who, placed against the light, makes the banquet more pleasant, the little dog that peeks out from under the tablecloth or the generous necklines of the ladies decked out in brightly colored clothes and restrained eroticism.
Years of fullness
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 can be assumed that, encouraged by Herrera, he wanted to know the latest innovations in painting practiced at court. Back in Seville, he worked on the foundation of a drawing academy, whose first session took place on January 2, 1660 at the fish market. Its objective was to allow both painting and sculpture teachers and young apprentices to perfect themselves in the anatomical drawing of the nude, for which the academy would facilitate their practice with a live model, paid for by the teachers, who also contributed the cost of firewood and candles, as the sessions took place at night. Murillo was its first co-president, along with Herrera el Mozo, who went to Madrid that same year to settle permanently at court. In November 1663 he still participated in the session that agreed on the drafting of the constitutions of the academy, but by then He had already left his presidency, since Sebastián de Llanos y Valdés appears in the documentation as head of it. According to Palomino, who always praises Murillo's mild character and his modesty, he would have abandoned it and established a private academy in his own home, so as not to deal with the haughty character of Juan de Valdés Leal, later elected president, who "in everything wanted to be alone".
Dating that year, 1660, is also one of the most significant and admired works of his production: the Birth of the Virgin from the Louvre Museum, painted for the overdoor of the Chapel of the Great Conception of the sevillan cathedral. In the center, under a small burst of glory, a group of matrons and angels in a decreasing composition indebted to Rubens joyfully swirl around the newborn, from whom a spotlight emanates that intensely illuminates the foreground and fades Towards the bottom. In this way, he creates atmospheric effects in the side scenes, further back and with autonomous light sources, in which Saint Anne appears on the left, in a bed under a canopy, contrasting its dim lighting with that of the chair located in the foreground to backlit, and two maidens to the right drying nappies by a fireplace. This carefully studied hierarchy of lights reminds critics like Diego Angulo of Dutch painting and specifically Rembrandt's painting, which Murillo was able to learn about through prints or even through the presence of some of his works in Sevillian collections, such as Melchor's. 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.
Dutch and Flemish influences are also noted in his landscapes, already praised by Palomino, who said about them: "it is not to be omitted the famous skill that our Murillo had in the countries". Apart from some pure landscape of doubtful attribution, such as the Landscape with a Waterfall in the Museo del Prado, these are landscape backgrounds in narrative compositions. The best examples in this order correspond to the four preserved canvases from the series of Jacob's stories that he painted for the Marquis of Villamanrique, exhibited on the façade of his palace at the consecration festivities of the church of Santa María la Blanca in 1665 and probably painted around 1660. Palomino, confusing the subject, as he talks about stories from David's life, tells that the Marquis of Villamanrique commissioned the landscapes to Ignacio de Iriarte, a specialist in the genre, and the figures to Murillo, but that at the same time When the painters disputed who had to do his part first, Murillo, annoyed, told him "if he thought he needed it for the countries, he was mistaken: and so he only made such paintings with stories, and countries, something as wonderful as yours; which the said Mr. Marqués brought to Madrid».
The series, which originally must have consisted of five paintings of which only four are known, was found in the 18th century in Madrid in the possession of the Marquis of Santiago and at the beginning of the 19th century it had already dispersed. Two of his stories are currently located in the Hermitage Museum, those representing Jacob blessed by Isaac and Jacob's Ladder, and the other two in the United States: Jacob looks for household idols in Rachel's shop, kept at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Jacob sets the rods for Laban's flock, owned by the Meadows Museum in Dallas. The wide landscapes, especially in the latter two, arranged around a central motif and open to a distant luminous background against which the diffuse outlines of the mountains stand out, suggest knowledge of Flemish landscape artists such as Joos de Momper or Jan Wildens, and perhaps also from the Italian landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, strictly contemporary, insofar as the attention given to cattle, abundant in both paintings, seems to refer to Orrente reinterpreted in the rich manner of the Sevillian. With absolute naturalism, Murillo will represent in the < i>Jacob sets the rods for Laban's flock including the mating of the sheep to which the biblical text alludes (Genesis, 30, 31), which for reasons of decorum was probably hidden under repainting already in the 17th century. XIX, to come to light again in the XX.
Big 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, in the hands of the Dominicans, prohibited attributing the term immaculate to the conception of Mary instead of to preach it directly from the Virgin, in the way in which his supporters had gone from conception of the Immaculate Virgin to Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The decree was not made public and only became known when the Holy Office censored some books for that reason. When the news reached Seville, the council responded by hanging a painting of Murillo's Immaculate Conception with the inscription "Conceived without sin" and the city itself went to the Courts of Castile in 1649 demanding intervention King. Nothing changed during the pontificate of Innocent X, but when Alexander VII was elevated to the pontifical throne in 1655, Philip IV redoubled his efforts to obtain the annulment of the decree and approval of the feast of the Immaculate Conception as it had been celebrated in Spain. After numerous efforts by Spanish emissaries, on December 8, 1661, Pope Alexander VII promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, which, although it was not yet the dogmatic definition that some expected, proclaimed antiquity of pious belief, he admitted his party, and affirmed that few Catholics rejected it anymore. The constitution was welcomed in Spain with enthusiasm and great festivals were celebrated everywhere, of which numerous artistic testimonies have remained.
In commemoration of the apostolic constitution, the parish priest of the church of Santa María la Blanca, Domingo Velázquez Soriano, agreed to proceed with a remodeling of the temple, an old synagogue, whose work was partly paid for by canon Justino de Neve, probably author of the commission to Murillo of four paintings to decorate his walls. The works, which transformed the old medieval building into a spectacular baroque temple, began in 1662 and were completed in 1665, inaugurating with solemn festivities meticulously described by Fernando de la Torre Farfán in Fiestas celebrated by the parish church of S. María la Blanca, Chapel of the Holy Metropolitan Church, and patriarchal of Seville: in obseqvio of the nvevo brief granted by N. Smo. Father Alexandro VII in favor of the pvrissimo mysterio de la Concepción sin culpa Original de María Santiisima. Our Lady, in the First Physical Moment of her being , published the following year in Seville. Farfán describes the church, whose walls already hung Murillo's paintings, and the ephemeral decorations installed in the square in front of the temple, where an altarpiece was arranged on a provisional stage with at least three other paintings by Murillo owned by Neve: one Immaculate Conception large in the central niche and on its sides the Good Shepherd and Saint John the Baptist Child.
Murillo's paintings, in the shape of a semicircular, represented stories of the foundation of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the two largest, located in the central nave and illuminated by the dome's skylights, and the Immaculate Conception and the Triumph of the Eucharist in the two minors, arranged at the head of the side naves. The four left Spain during the War of Independence and only the first two, destined for the Napoleon Museum, were returned in 1816, later joining the Prado Museum, while the remaining two, after successive sales, belong to the Louvre Museum., the one that represents the Immaculate Conception, and a private English collection the Triumph of the Eucharist.
Especially the first two are masterpieces. In the Dream of the patrician Juan and his wife Murillo represents the moment in which, in dreams, the Virgin appears to them in the month of August to ask them to dedicate a temple in the place that they will see traced with Snow on the Esquiline Mountain. Instead of showing them asleep in bed, Murillo imagines them overcome by sleep, he reclining on the table covered by a red tablecloth, on which the thick book he has been reading rests closed, and she on a cushion, according to the custom of the time, with his head drooping over the interrupted work. Even a little white dog sleeps curled up on itself. The decreasing composition amplifies the feeling of relaxation. The penumbra that invades the scene, broken by the halo that surrounds Mary with the Child, appears nuanced by the lights that subtly highlight each detail of the composition and create, with the fluid and blurred treatment of the contours, the space where they are located. the figures placidly.
The story continues with the presentation of Patricio Juan and his wife before Pope Liberio. Murillo divides the scene, arranging on the left the patrician and his wife before the pope, who has had the same dream, and on the right he represents drawn in the distance the procession that goes to the mountain to verify the content of the dreams, in the that Pope Liberius reappears under the canopy. The main scene is arranged on a wide stage of classical architecture illuminated from the left. The light falls mainly on the woman and the religious who accompanies her, creating a backlight with which the figure of the pope stands out against the naked architecture, possibly portrayed with the features of Alexander VII. The same taste for backlighting is found in the procession, painted with light brushwork and almost sketchy, where the figures of the spectators in the foreground appear as shadowy shapes, thus highlighting the luminosity of the procession itself.
Paintings for the Capuchin church in Seville
After some paintings made around 1664 for the convent of San Agustín, of which it is worth highlighting the one representing Saint Augustine contemplating the Virgin and the crucified Christ (Museo del Prado), between 1665 and In 1669 he painted 16 canvases in two stages for the church of the Capuchin convent in Seville, for its main altarpiece, the altarpieces of the side chapels and the choir for which he painted an Immaculate Conception. After the confiscation of Mendizábal in 1836, the paintings went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville, except for the Jubileo de la Porciúncula which occupied the center of the main altarpiece, kept in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The repertoire of saints that makes up this collection includes, according to Pérez Sánchez, some of the "capital works of their best moment". The paired figures of San Leandro and San Buenaventura and Saints Justa and Rufina, who occupied the sides of the first body of the altarpiece, have that character so typical of the painter of vivid portraits and profound humanity in their serene and melancholic expressions. The Sevillian saints, accompanied by some beautifully crafted ceramic pots alluding to their profession as potters and their martyrdom, hold a reproduction of the Giralda in memory of the 1504 earthquake, in which, according to tradition, they prevented its fall by hugging it. but their presence in the altarpiece is due to the fact that the church had been built in the place occupied by the old amphitheater where they had received their martyrdom. San Leandro also alluded to the history of the temple, since tradition affirmed that in that place he had built a convent before the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which now allegorically transferred to San Buenaventura, whom, contrary to his usual iconography, Murillo He represented bearded, because it was a Capuchin convent, and with the model of a Gothic church, probably copied from an engraving, to signify its antiquity.
In the paintings dedicated to Franciscan saints —San Antonio de Padua, San Félix Cantalicio—, but especially in the San Francisco embracing Christ on the Cross which is among the most popular paintings of the painter, the softness of lights and colors, harmonizing without violence the brown of the Franciscan habit with the greenish backgrounds or with the naked body of Christ, intensify the intimate character of his mystical visions, stripped of all drama. Very representative of the painter's evolution is the Adoration of the Shepherds, painted for the altar of a side chapel. Compared with other previous versions of the same subject, such as the one preserved in the Prado Museum from around 1650 and strictly naturalistic observance, it can be clearly seen in it, the novelty that these paintings represent in terms of the pictorial invoice of their light brushstrokes. and the use of light to create space with it, using backlighting, in contrast to the chiaroscuro and dark modeling of his early works.
Santo Tomás de Villanueva, the painting that the painter called «his Canvas», originally located in the first chapel on the right, is a good example of the degree of mastery achieved by the painter in this series. Tomás de Villanueva, although an Augustinian and not a Franciscan, had recently been canonized by Alexander VII and as Archbishop of Valencia had stood out for his begging spirit, which Murillo highlights by arranging him surrounded by beggars whom he helps next to a table with an open book, whose reading he has abandoned, to signify in this way that theological science without charity is nothing. The scene takes place in an interior with sober classical architecture and remarkable depth marked by the alternation of illuminated and shadowed spaces. A monumental column in the medium shot against the light creates a luminous halo around the head of the saint, whose stature is increased by the crippled beggar kneeling before him, with a studied foreshortening of his bare back. The contrasted psychologies of the beggars who have been helped seem just as studied, from the bent-over old man who puts his hand up to his eyes, with a gesture of astonishment or disbelief, the old woman who looks with a sullen countenance and the reddish boy who waits pleadingly, to the child who In the lower left corner of the canvas and highlighted against the light, he shows his mother with radiant joy the coins he has received.
The series of works of mercy for the Hospital de la Caridad
The Brotherhood of Charity, founded according to legend in the mid-15th century by Pedro Martínez, prebendary of the cathedral, to bury the executed, began shortly before 1578, when the brothers rented the house to the Crown Chapel of San Jorge located in the Reales Atarazanas and its first Rule is dated, in which the brotherhood's own objective was to bury the dead. For years he led a languid life, to the point that in 1640 the chapel was in ruins and the brothers decided to demolish it, beginning the construction of a new one, the completion of which would take more than 25 years. The plague of 1649 allowed its revitalization, with the incorporation of new brothers, but it was the entry of Miguel Mañara, heir to a wealthy merchant family of Corsican origin, and his election as older brother in December 1663, which prompted the conclusion of the works of the church, to which was added the conversion of a warehouse in the Atarazanas into a hospice and the reform of the brotherhood itself, which now would also have as objectives to welcome homeless people and feed them in their hospice, converted into dispensary for the incurable, and pick up the abandoned sick to transfer them, on the shoulders of the brothers if necessary, to the hospitals where they were cared for.
Mañara was most likely the author of the decorative programme, adjusted to a coherent narrative discourse, and the person responsible for choosing its architects: Murillo and Valdés Leal, in charge of the pictorial work, Bernardo Simón de Pineda for the architecture of the altarpieces and Pedro Roldán in charge of the sculpture. The minutes of the meeting of the brotherhood of July 13, 1670, collected in the Libro de Cabildos, gives information on what had been done up to that moment and clarifies its meaning:
He also proposed Nro. elder brother Don Miguel de Mañara as he completed the work of nra. church and put himself in it with the greatness and beauty that is seen six hieroglyphics that explain six of the works of Mercy, leaving the to bury the dead that is the main of the nro. Instituto para la Capilla mayor.
The "hieroglyphics" mentioned there, an illustration of the works of mercy, can be identified with the six paintings by Murillo that, according to the descriptions of Antonio Ponz and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, hung from the walls of the nave of the church by under the cornice, forming another of the capital series of the painter's mature stage. Four of them were stolen by Marshal Soult during the War of Independence and are currently scattered in different museums, only the two largest, in landscape format, which were located in the transept, remaining in their place. His affairs, each related to a work of mercy, are: Healing the paralytic (London, National Gallery), visiting the sick; Saint Peter Freed by the Angel (St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), redeeming captives; Multiplying the loaves and fishes, in situ, feeding the hungry; The Return of the Prodigal Son (Washington, National Gallery of Art), clothing the nude; Abraham and the Three Angels (Ottawa, National Gallery), Hosting the Pilgrim; and Moses causing water to sprout from the rock of Horeb, in situ, to give drink to the thirsty. Regarding them, Ceán Bermúdez commented:
Those who do not grant Murillo more than the beauty of the color, may observe in the back of the paralytic of the pool as understood the anatomy of the human body: in the three angels who appear to Abraham, the proportions of man: in the heads of Christ, Moyses, the father of family and other personges, the nobleness of the characters: the expression of the spirit in the figures of the son Pró
Diego Angulo highlighted, along with the painter's ability to avoid repeating himself and his mastery of gesticulation in the secondary characters, who with the diversity of their reactions deepen the narrative content, the breadth of the architectural space represented in the porticos of the probatic pool, where by means of light and the gradual blurring of the forms remarkable effects of aerial perspective are achieved. In the two largest canvases, the most complex in terms of composition and number of characters, however, he also resorted to the inspiration of others, having indicated debts for the Moisés of a canvas of the same subject by the Genoese Gioacchino Assereto, which was well known in Seville and is currently located in the Museo del Prado, and by Herrera the Elder for the Multiplying loaves and fishes, both reinterpreted with their particular sensitivity.
The cycle of works of mercy entrusted to Murillo was completed with the sculptural group of the Burial of Christ executed by Pedro Roldán, which, because it represents the most important charitable work at the origin of the institution, bury the dead, occupied the main altarpiece. Apart from this series, in 1672 the brotherhood paid for another four paintings delivered by Murillo and Valdes Leal that year, whose affairs completed the message of the previous one according to Mañara's concerns and meditations, expressed in his Discourse on Truth .
These four canvases, finished off in a semicircular, were on the one hand the famous «hieroglyphics of the last days» of Valdés Leal, located at the foot of the nave, near the entrance of the temple, reminding the one who entered the expiration of earthly goods and the proximity of divine judgment, in which the scales could tip on the side of salvation through the exercise of the works of mercy shown in the previous series; but since all the motifs in that series had been taken from the Bible, the two new paintings by Murillo, located on the altars of the nave, came to propose to the brothers models of charity with which they could more easily identify, for the greater closeness of its protagonists: Saint John of God and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary curing the afflicted ones, both preserved in their place. Both served as an example to a heroic degree of the new charitable practices that Mañara had entrusted to the brotherhood, getting personally and directly involved in the exercise of charity, as he expected the brothers to do, carrying beggars on their shoulders if necessary. sick wherever they found them, as Juan de Dios from Granada had done, or cleaning their wounds without turning their faces "no matter how sore and disgusting it may be", of which the holy Hungarian queen was an example. And it is in this way that Murillo showed his sick beggars, even influencing the realistic and unpleasant interpretation of the sores, which did not fail to arouse some criticism when the painting of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary came to Paris, carried by French troops. Soon after, he would receive as much criticism as praise in France itself for the ability of the Spanish to combine the sublime and the vulgar.
Other religious iconography
The Immaculate Conception
There are about twenty paintings on the subject of the Immaculate Conception painted by Murillo, a figure second only to José Antolínez and which has led him to be considered the painter of the Immaculate Conception, an iconography of which he was not the inventor, but which he renewed in Seville, where the devotion was deeply rooted.
The most primitive of those known is probably the so-called Concepción Grande (Seville, Museum of Fine Arts), painted for the Franciscan church where it was located over the arch of the chancel, at a great height, which allows to explain the corpulence of his figure. Due to its technique, it can be taken to a date close to 1650, when the transept of the church was rebuilt after suffering a collapse. Already in this first approach to the subject, Murillo decisively broke with the statism that characterized the Sevillian Inmaculadas, always attentive to the models established by Pacheco and Zurbarán. Possibly influenced by Ribera's Immaculate Conception for the Discalced Augustinian Sisters of Salamanca, which he was able to discover from an engraving, Murillo endowed it with vigorous dynamism and ascending sense through the movement of the cape. The Virgin wears a white tunic and a blue cloak, in accordance with the vision of the Portuguese Beatriz de Silva recalled by Pacheco in his iconographic instructions, but Murillo dispensed entirely with the remaining Marian attributes that abounded in previous representations of a didactic nature and, in the traditional iconography of the apocalyptic woman, she left only the moon under her feet and the "sun dress", understood as the amber-colored atmospheric background against which the silhouette of the Virgin is silhouetted. On a plinth of clouds supported by four little angels and reduced the landscape to a brief misty strip, the mere image of María was enough for Murillo to explain her immaculate conception.
Murillo's second approximation to the immaculista 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 in two volumes Glorias de Mary. The painting, large and currently in the Archiepiscopal Palace of Seville, was commissioned in 1652 from Murillo by the Brotherhood of Vera Cruz, which had its headquarters in the convent of San Francisco. The friar appears portrayed before an image of the Immaculate Conception, accompanied by angels carrying the symbols of the litanies, and interrupts the writing to look at the viewer, seated in front of a table on which rest the two thick volumes that he wrote in honor of Mary. The back of the frailuno armchair, superimposed on the golden border that frames the image, allows us to subtly appreciate that the sitter is in front of a painting and not in the real presence of the Immaculate Conception, a painting within a painting framed by columns and festoons with garlands. The model of the Virgin, with her hands crossed on her chest and her elevated view, is already the one that the painter will recreate, without ever repeating himself, in the many later versions of her.
In the Immaculate Conception painted for the church of Santa María la Blanca, which has already been mentioned, he also included portraits of mystery devotees. Torre Farfán identified among them the parish priest, Domingo Velázquez, who was able to suggest to the painter the complex theological content of this canvas and his partner, the Triumph of the Eucharist . Both appear linked and are explained by the texts inscribed in the phylacteries drawn on them: «in principio dilexit eam» (In the beginning [God] loved her), text made up of the first words of Genesis and a verse from the Book of Wisdom (VIII, 3), text that accompanies the image of the Immaculate , and «in finem dilexit eos, Joan Cap. XIII”, with the allegory of the Eucharist, words taken from the story of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John: “Jesus knowing that the hour had come for him to pass from this world to the Father, having loved his own, he loved them to the end». The Immaculate Conception, whose dogmatic definition was demanded by its defenders, was thus associated with the Eucharist, a central element of Catholic doctrine: the same manifestation of love for men that had moved Jesus at the end of his days on earth to incarnate in bread, had preserved Mary from sin before all time. And although it is probable that Murillo was given both the subjects and the inscribed texts, it should be remembered that when Sevillian painters entered the drawing academy they had to take an oath of fidelity to the Holy Sacrament and to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
The Inmaculada of Santa María la Blanca responds, moreover, to a prototype created by the painter around 1660 or a little later, years to which the so-called Immaculate of El Escorial< belongs /i> (Museo del Prado), one of the most beautiful and well-known of the painter, who here used an adolescent model, younger than in his other versions. The undulating profile of the figure, with the cloak slightly detached from the body in a diagonal direction, and the harmony of the blue and white colors of the dress with the silvery gray of the clouds below the slightly golden glow that envelops the figure of the Virgin, These are traits found in all its subsequent versions up to what is probably the last: the Inmaculada Concepción de los Venerables, also called Immaculate Soult (Museo del Prado), which It could have been commissioned in 1678 by Justino de Neve for one of the altars in the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville. Despite her considerable size, the Virgin appears here in smaller dimensions by considerably increasing the number of little angels that flutter joyfully around her, anticipating the delicate taste of the Rococo. Taken from Spain by Marshal Soult, when it was considered, according to Ceán Bermúdez, "superior to all those in his hand", it was acquired by the Louvre Museum in 1852 for 586,000 gold francs, the highest amount ever paid so far for a painting. Its subsequent entry into the Prado Museum occurred as a result of an agreement signed between the Spanish and French governments of Philippe Pétain in 1940, when the painter's estimate was at a low point, being 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 Prado Museum, which at the time was considered the original version of the portrait.
Child Jesus and Saint John
The Virgin and Child in an isolated figure and full-length is another of the themes frequently dealt with by Murillo. In this case, they are generally small works, probably intended for private oratories. Most of those conserved were painted between 1650 and 1660, still using a chiaroscuro technique and, regardless of their devout character, with a strong naturalistic sense of feminine beauty and childlike grace. The elegance of the slender youthful models of his Virgins is undoubtedly due to the influence of Raphael, known through engravings, as well as the delicate expression of maternal feelings that make the accompaniment of other symbols unnecessary, more typical of medieval religiosity., but that could still be found in the compositions of Francisco de Zurbarán dedicated to 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 clothing, as well as in some of the versions of which there are a greater number of old copies, such as the Virgin of the Rosary with the Child from the Prado Museum or the Virgin and Child from the Pitti Palace, in which the tender expression of the Virgin and the playful attitude of the Child are combined with the choice of a rich range of pastel shades of pink and blue, a foretaste of Rococo taste.
With the same naturalistic spirit he treated other motifs from the cycle of Christ's childhood, 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 will also be revealed in the isolated figures of the Child Jesus asleep on the cross or blessing and the child Baptist, or Saint John, among which it is worth mentioning the version kept in the Museo del Prado, a late work, dating to around 1675, and one of the most popular by the painter, in which the Child with a mystical gesture and the lamb that accompanies him are drawn with fluid brushwork on a silvery landscape of undone profiles.
There are three known versions of the old theme of the Good Shepherd, interpreted by Murillo in a children's version: the one that is probably the oldest of them, the one in the Museo del Prado, painted around 1660, presents the Child resting one hand on the lost sheep, upright, looking at the viewer with a certain melancholic air and sitting in a bucolic landscape of classical ruins, which makes it an effective devotional image. A later version, in London, Lane Collection, with Jesus standing leading the flock, leaves more space for the pastoral landscape and the face of the Child, now turned to heaven, gains in expressiveness. His partner in the past, the Saint John and the Lamb in London, National Gallery, in which the little Baptist appears with a smiling face as he embraces the lamb with childish coolness, caught Gainsborough's attention who he was able to own a copy and draw inspiration from it for his Boy with a Dog from the Alfred Beit collection. The latest version of this theme (Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut), worked with remarkable ease of brushwork and soft colours, already belongs to the painter's last years, with a more markedly sweet and delicate sense of beauty. The Children of the Shell in the Museo del Prado, where the Child Jesus and Saint John appear together in an attitude of play, is, like the previous ones, a devotional image aimed at simple piety, but served with a refined pictorial technique, enormously popular.
Passion Themes
In Murillo's paintings, scenes of martyrdom, although they are not lacking —Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, Museo del Prado— are very rare. Much more frequent are the devotional and pious images that allow him to influence the emotional aspects of the subject represented, stripped of any narrative context, in the same way that he will approach the themes of the Passion of Christ.
The Ecce homo in an isolated figure and forming a pair with La Dolorosa, according to Titian's model, is the most frequently repeated image of the Passion themes, whether as a bust (Museum of Prado), half-length (New York, Hecksecher Museum, c. 1660-70; El Paso, El Paso Museum of Art, c. 1675-82), or full-figure and seated (Madrid, private collection), as may being the one that formed a pair with the Dolorosa of the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville. Another iconography that is repeated is that of the Christ after the flagellation (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, c.1665-1670, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), a non-evangelical subject, but widely dealt with by sacred orators, who will like to propose to the Christian, due to its expressive force, the contemplation of the helpless and bruised redeemer, picking up modestly the garments that have been scattered around 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 us to meditate on the need for repentance and the sacrament of forgiveness, has in Murillo's production a notable example for the client for whom It was painted by Canon Justino de Neve, and for the rich and rare material used as a support: a sheet of obsidian from Mexico. The small piece was mentioned in the inventory of Neve's assets made at his death as a pair with a Prayer in the garden painted on the same material and both were acquired at his auction by the surgeon Juan Salvador Navarro, from whose property they passed to that of Nicolás de Omazur (Louvre).
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 represented already dead, with the sign of the spear on his side and attached to the tree by three nails. They are usually small pieces and sometimes painted on small wooden crosses as intended for private devotion and, in the same way that Martínez Montañés had done in the Cristo de los calices, an image of much devotion in Seville, the traces of martyrdom attenuated so as not to hinder the contemplation of the beautiful figure of Christ with the abuse of blood.
Profane genres
Genre painting
In Murillo's extensive production there are also around 25 genre paintings, with motifs mainly, although not exclusively, for children. The first news that we have of almost all of them come from outside Spain, which leads us to think that they were painted by order of some of the Flemish merchants settled in Seville, clients also of religious paintings such as Nicolás de Omazur, an important collector. of the painter's works, and destined for the Nordic market, perhaps as a secular counterpoint to the scenes dedicated to the childhood of Jesus. Some of them, such as the Children Playing Dice in the Alte Pinakothek from Munich, were already mentioned in the name of Murillo in an inventory carried out in Antwerp in 1698 and at the beginning of the 18th century they were acquired by Maximilian of Baviera for the Bavarian royal collection.
The influences he might have received from the Danish painter Eberhard Keil, who arrived in Rome in 1656, and from the Dutch bamboccianti, are not enough to explain the Murillesque approach to the genre, which in the scale of his figures, integrated into reduced landscape backgrounds —but in any case greater than in Keil's painting, who fills the space with his figures— and in the choice of his subjects, purely anecdotal and reflected with spontaneous joy, he creates an unprecedented genre painting, born of the naturalistic spirit of his time and the attraction that child psychology exerts on the painter, also made manifest, as has already been verified, in his religious painting.
Although his protagonists are usually beggar children or children from humble families, poorly dressed and even ragged, his figures always transmit optimism, as the painter seeks the happy moment of the game or snack to which they enjoy themselves. The loneliness and air of commiseration with which he portrayed the Boy Grooming in the Louvre Museum, which, due to his technique and treatment of light, can be dated to around 1650 or a little earlier, will disappear in later works, with dates ranging from 1665 to 1675. The comparison, already proposed by Diego Angulo, between the Boy Grooming in the Louvre and another painting on a similar subject, but of a later date, the one representing a Grandmother delousing her grandson, kept in the Munich Art Gallery, illustrates the change in attitude: the notes of sadness and loneliness have completely disappeared and what attracts the painter is the childish spirit always ready to play, portraying the child entertained with a crust of bread and distracted by the little dog that plays between his legs while his grandmother takes care of his hygiene, perhaps transferring to painting the old saying, "healthy and beautiful child with lice". That childish joy is the absolute protagonist of another small canvas small format treated with lively and sketchy brushwork preserved in the National Gallery of London, the so-called Laughing boy leaning out of the window, with no other anecdote than the simple open smile of the boy leaning out of the window from which he sees something that makes him laugh, but is hidden from the viewers of the painting. It is also perceived in the work of the Russian Hermitage Boy with a dog.
Boy snooping1650, Paris, Louvre Museum.
Three boys. (Two golfers and a black man...about 1670, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Boy laughing in the window1675, London, National Gallery.
Pictures such as Two children eating from a lunch box and Children playing dice —a game disapproved of by moralists—, both kept in the Munich art gallery, although they may be Also inspired by proverbs or picaresque stories, which could not be identified, they do not seem to respond to any other intention than to portray, with a kind tone, groups of children who express their joy while playing or eating sweets, and who are capable of survive with their limited resources thanks to the vitality that their own youth gives them. Of a similar tone, but perhaps with greater plot content, are the two conserved in the Dulwich Picture Gallery: Invitation to the game of ball with a shovel, which reflects the doubts of the boy sent to do some errand when another, of mischievous appearance, invites him to participate in the game, and the so-called Three Boys or Two urchins and a black boy, whose slight anecdote allows the painter to confront various psychological reactions to a unexpected event: a black boy with a pitcher on his shoulder, in which Murillo could have portrayed Martín, his slave suntanned black, born around 1662, comes to where there are two other boys ready to have a snack and With a friendly gesture, he asks them for a piece of the cake that they are going to eat, to which one of them reacts amused while the one with the cake tries to hide it in his hands with a fearful gesture.
With the same amiable and anecdotal tone, attracted by the disinherited and simple people, with their spontaneous reactions, in Two Women in the Window (Washington, National Gallery of Art) he probably portrayed a scene brothel, as has been pointed out since the 19th century. The so-called Girl with Flowers from the Dulwich Picture Gallery, once considered a genre painting and mistaken for a saleswoman of flowers, on the other hand, responds better to the allegorical genre and can be interpreted as a representation of Spring, whose partner could be the personification of Summer in the form of a young man covered with a turban and spikes, recently entered into the National Gallery of Scotland. It could be the two paintings representing these seasons of the year that Nicolás de Omazur acquired in Justino de Neve's estate, and they would not also be the only allegories painted by Murillo, since Omazur was also owner of a painting, currently e unaccounted for, dedicated to Music, Bacchus and Love.
Portraits
Although their number is relatively small, the portraits painted by Murillo are spread throughout his career and present a notable formal variety, to which the taste of the clients would not be alien. The one of Canon Justino de Neve (London, National Gallery), seated at his desk, with a lapdog at his feet and before an elegant architectural background open to a garden, responds perfectly to models typical of Spanish portraiture, with the accent placed on the dignity of the character portrayed. Full-length portraits such as that of Don Andrés de Andrade in the Metropolitan of New York or the Caballero con rolilla in the Museo del Prado, show the double influence of Velázquez and Anton van Dyck which he will once again exhibit with remarkable mastery, fluid brushwork and sober color, in the portrait of Don Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara (Madrid, duques de Alba collection), one of the last works of the painter, accurately dated to 1680 when the model, a canon of the cathedral, was 25 years old.
The portraits of Nicolás de Omazur (Museo del Prado), like that of his wife Isabel de Malcampo —known from only one copy—, half-length and inscribed in an illusionist frame, answer for contrary to the more specifically Flemish and Dutch taste, both for the format and for its allegorical content, by portraying them holding flowers in her hands and he a skull, symbols typical of vanitas painting, from a rich Nordic tradition. This is the format also chosen for his two self-portraits, one more youthful, which pretends to be painted on a marble stone in the manner of a classical relief, and the one from the National Gallery in London, painted for his sons, inscribed in an oval frame in the manner of a trompe l'oeil and accompanied by the tools of his trade.
Very singular and alien to all these models is the Portrait of Don Antonio Hurtado de Salcedo, also called The Hunter (circa 1664, private collection), a portrait of great format for being destined to occupy a privileged place in the house of his client, later the Marquis of Legarda, whom he portrays in the middle of the hunt, frontal and upright, with the shotgun resting on the ground and in the company of a servant and three dogs. Nothing in it is reminiscent of Velázquez's portraits of members of the royal family in hunting dress; and on the contrary, it seems closer to certain works by Carreño with possible Vandyckian influence.
Last works and death
After the series of the Hospital de la Caridad, splendidly paid, Murillo did not receive new commissions of that magnitude. A new cycle of bad harvests led to the famine of 1678 and two years later an earthquake caused serious damage. The resources of the church were dedicated to charity, postponing the beautification of the temples. However, Murillo did not lack work thanks to the protection provided by his old friends, such as Canon Justino de Neve and the foreign merchants established in Seville, who commissioned 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 gather up to 31 works by Murillo, some as significant as The Wedding at Cana from Birmingham, Barber Institute. Another of those merchants fond of the painter was the Genoese Giovanni Bielato, established in Cádiz around 1662. Bielato died in 1681, leaving the seven paintings by Murillo from different periods that he owned to the Capuchin convent in his hometown, currently scattered in various museums.. Among them was a new version in landscape format of the theme from Saint Thomas of Villanueva Giving Alms (London, The Wallace Collection, around 1670), with a new and admirable repertoire of beggars. He also bequeathed to the Capuchins of Cádiz a certain amount of money that they used in painting the altarpiece of his church, entrusted to Murillo.
The legend of his death, as reported by Antonio Palomino, is precisely related to this commission, since he would have died as a result of a fall from the scaffolding when he was painting, in the Cadiz convent itself, the large painting of the Betrothal of Saint Catherine. The fall, Palomino maintained, produced a hernia that "because of his great honesty" he did not allow himself to be recognized, and he died from it a short time later. The truth is that the painter began working on this work without leaving Seville at the end of of 1681 or beginnings of 1682, supervening him the death the 3 of April of this year. Only a few days before, on March 28, he had still participated in one of the bread distributions organized by the Brotherhood of Charity, and his will, in which he named his son Gaspar Esteban Murillo, clergyman, Justino de Neve and to Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio, it is dated in Seville the same day of his death. In it, he declared that he was indebted to Nicolás de Omazur, to whom he had given two small canvases worth sixty pesos on account of the one hundred that Omazur had given him. He had delivered and left two devotional canvases unfinished, one of Santa Catalina that Diego del Campo had commissioned him and for which he had already collected the agreed 32 pesos and another half-length of Our Lady, commissioned by a weaver "of whose I don't remember my name», in addition to the large canvas of the Mystic Betrothal of Saint Catherine for the main altar of the Capuchins of Cádiz, of which he was able to complete only the drawing on the canvas and begin the application of color in the three figures pri main. His disciple Francisco Meneses Osorio would be in charge of its completion, to whom the remaining canvases of the altarpiece, all preserved in the Museum of Cádiz, correspond in their entirety.
Disciples and followers
In the last decades of the 17th century, the friendly and calm painting of Murillo, with his models of Virgins and saints impregnated with a sweet and delicate sentimentality, prevailed in Seville over the more decidedly baroque and dramatic overtones of Valdés Leal, filling with his influence a good part of the Sevillian painting of the following century. It is, however, a superficial influence, focused on the imitation of models and compositions, without reaching any of his followers the mastery of light and loose drawing or the luminosity and transparency of color typical of the master. Of the direct disciples, the best known and closest is Francisco Meneses Osorio, who completed the work barely started by Murillo on the altarpiece of the Capuchins of Cádiz. An independent painter since 1663, his most personal works can be seen together with the influence of Murillo Zurbarán's most retarded. The same thing happens with Cornelio Schut, who arrived in Seville probably already trained as a painter, of whom some drawings very close to those of Murillo are known. His works in his oil, however, are never more than discreet and show a diversity 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. However, his paintings with children's affairs (Children Playing Dice, Museo del Prado) are hardly reminiscent of those of the master if it is not for the theme, since he departed from him so much in composition, always more variegated in the disciple, as in the technique, in which he used brushstrokes loaded with paste.
Jerónimo de Bobadilla, Juan Simón Gutiérrez and Esteban Márquez de Velasco were linked to Murillo's painting, without it being possible to specify the degree of personal relationship, from whom some works of a certain quality have come, greatly influenced by the master, and Sebastián Gómez from Granada, about whom a legend was woven that made him Murillo's "slave painter", probably because he drew a parallel with Velázquez and Juan de Pareja. With Alonso Miguel de Tovar and Bernardo Lorente Germán, the painter of the Divinas Pastoras, Murillo's influence goes back to the first half of the 18th century. Both of them, along with Domingo Martínez, a Murillesque taste for the delicate and tender, served the court during their stay in Seville from 1729 to 1733, a moment of glory for Murillo's painting given the fondness shown to him by Queen Isabel de Farnesio, who bought as many works as she could, including a large part of those that are currently kept by him in the Museum of the P rado. At that time, none of his genre paintings were left in Seville and Palomino wrote, with some grief, since what was valued was the sweetness of color rather than drawing, that "thus today, outside of Spain, a painting by Murillo, more than one by Titian, nor by Van-Dick. So much can the flattery of color, to win the popular aura! ".
Reception and critical assessment
Pictures 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 paintings were acquired for Maximilian II. Also before the end of the century, some of his works arrived in Italy, in this case of a religious nature, donated by the merchant Giovanni Bielato, and in England, brought by a certain lord Godolphin who in 1693 would have bought for The painting entitled Children of Morella, probably the one currently known as Three Boys, auctioned with the collection of the English Minister Plenipotentiary in Rome, brought a high price. But the decisive impulse The greatest extension of his fame came from the first biography dedicated to the painter, included in the 1683 Latin edition of the Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae of the painter and treatise writer Joachim von Sandrart, who only mentioned Velázquez, whose portraits had astonished the Romans, and dedicated a biography to José de Ribera, but including him among the Italians, Murillo being therefore the only Spaniard with his own biography, also illustrated with his self-portrait. In reality, except for the fact that he was born 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 at the level of Italian painters, as the "new Pablo Veronese"., and imagine his burial accompanied by solemn obsequies, carrying the coffin "two marquises and four knights of various orders, accompanied by innumerable crowds".
In contrast, and despite the fact that Antonio Palomino affirmed that an Inmaculada by Murillo had been exhibited in Madrid in 1670, causing general astonishment, and that Carlos II had summoned him to court, which the painter would have discarded it due to his advanced age, none of his paintings had entered the royal collections when his inventory was made in 1700. It will be precisely the biography that Palomino dedicates to him, published in 1724, and although with some inaccuracies, the best basis for the knowledge and subsequent assessment of the artist. In it he gave an account of the high price that his works reached abroad, which could have influenced the acquisition of seventeen works by Isabel de Farnesio during the stay of the court in Seville between 1729 and 1733.
Mengs, First Painter to King Carlos III and painting theorist, judged Murillo's painting in two different styles, the first stronger because it adhered to nature and the second more "sweet". Although Velázquez was already a superior painter for him, Murillo's prestige continued to increase 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, for the that it was expressly forbidden to sell his paintings to foreign buyers, since «the King had received news [...] that some foreigners buy in Seville all the paintings they can acquire by Bartolomé Murillo, and other famous painters, to extract them outside the Reyno". The order added that those who wished to sell works by the painter could in any case contact the king to offer them for sale and thus be incorporated into the royal collections, but the effects of this provision must have been very limited, since only three of his works were incorporated into the Crown during this period, one of them, a Penitent Magdalene currently in the museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, confiscated in customs na de Ágreda when it was intended to export illegally.
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 bulldog, inspired by the self-portrait of the Sevillian, and the copies of Murillo's works made by Gainsborough, who arrived to owning a Saint John the Baptist in the Desert currently considered a studio work. Murillo's influence, on the other hand, is evident in what Joshua Reynolds called fancy pictures, genre scenes starring children, generally beggars, frequent especially in the last years of Gainsborough's activity (Girl with dog and pitcher from the Bleit collection, Blessington) and, to some extent, also present in Reynolds' own painting.
Murillo's reception in France was delayed when he was silenced by André Félibien. However, already in the 18th century some of his works arrived in the country, including 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 was there that the popularity of the painter reached its peak, already 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 so-called Immaculate of Soult, the highest price ever paid for a painting. Other important batches of Murillo's paintings went up for auction in Paris and London with the collections of the banker Alejandro María Aguado and Luis Felipe I, highly valued after their exhibition at the Spanish Gallery of the Louvre between 1838 and 1848. Among those in France who appreciated and praised Murillo's work is the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, who copied his Saint Catherine, model of feminine beauty, in the same way that the realist Henri Fantin Latour was to leave his personal version of the Beggar Boy (Castres, Goya Museum). With Théophile Gautier Murillo was to establish himself as the "painter of heaven", while Velázquez was of the earth, although there were also critics who, like Louis Viardot, accused the painter of falling excessively into vulgarity with his nothing idealized popular types.
Jacob Burckhardt, after visiting the Spanish Gallery of the Louvre, will regard him as one of the greatest artists of all time, admirable for the realism of his canvases in which "beauty continues to be a piece of nature", but also for his "curious idealism", considering the Self-portrait of London superior to the portraits of Velázquez. "In Murillo, beauty is still a fragment of nature, and not a meditation that has gone through numerous reflections," he writes. After him, Carl Justi, the great biographer of Velázquez, and Wilhelm von Bode upheld the prestige of the painter in Germany. already in the second half of the 19th century, when his fame began to decline, accused by critics of being a cloying painter, excessively sweet and lacking in dramatic tension, as well as a propagandist for the Catholic religion.
A lot of responsibility for this decline in critical appraisal had the multiple copies of very poor quality that were made of his works in all kinds of supports, from devotional prints and calendars to boxes of chocolates, forgetting to judge him, according to Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, in "his milieu and his time", a task to which August L. Mayer or Diego Angulo Íñiguez, among others, will devote themselves, already in the 20th century, who will draw up a biography of the painter based on documentation and stripped of myths, At the same time that the latter presented in 1980, on the eve of the third centenary of his death, the refined catalog of his complete works.
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