Painter of the Bible
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was the leading painter of seventeenth-century Seville and the principal Spanish religious painter of the Baroque generation after Velázquez.
Life & work
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was the leading painter of seventeenth-century Seville and the principal Spanish religious painter of the Baroque generation after Velázquez. Born in Seville in 1617, the youngest of fourteen children of a barber-surgeon, orphaned at ten and raised by an older sister, he was apprenticed to the local painter Juan del Castillo and then absorbed the Spanish Caravaggesque manner of Francisco de Zurbarán in the 1640s. He worked in Seville for almost his entire career, with one documented trip to Madrid in the late 1650s where he studied the royal collection. He died in Seville in 1682.
His Christian religious work runs to several hundred surviving canvases. The series of eleven canvases for the Capuchin church in Seville (1665–1666, now in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla), the Hospital de la Caridad cycle of the Acts of Mercy (1670–1674, painted for Miguel de Mañara's reformist confraternity, including the great Moses Striking the Rock and the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes), and the eight canvases for Santa María la Blanca (1665, dispersed) anchor his Sevillian altarpiece corpus. The Two Trinities — sometimes called the Earthly and the Heavenly Family, with the Christ Child standing between Mary and Joseph and the Father and Spirit appearing above — fills the National Gallery in London with one of the most-reproduced Spanish Baroque devotional images of any period.
His Madonna of the Immaculate Conception became, by repetition, the canonical visualization of that doctrine in Spanish Catholic art. The dozens of versions he painted across his career — the Walpole Conception (now Hermitage), the Soult Conception (Prado, c. 1678), the Aranjuez Conception, and many smaller variants — established the visual conventions (the Virgin standing on a crescent moon, surrounded by cherubs, in white robes and a blue mantle, gaze upturned) that Spanish and Spanish-American religious art would follow for the next two centuries.
He also painted a substantial body of genre scenes — beggar children, flower girls, street boys eating melons — that the nineteenth-century French Romantic painters and the Spanish Costumbrista tradition treated as a foundational precedent. He died from a fall while painting the Marriage of Saint Catherine for the Capuchin church in Cádiz; the painting was completed by his pupil Francisco Meneses Osorio. He was buried in the Sevillian church of Santa Cruz, since destroyed.
Notable works in detail
The Immaculate Conception (Isaiah 7:14)
The Immaculate Conception, painted by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo around 1670 in oil on canvas and one of the many versions Murillo produced of this defining Marian subject across his Sevillian career, depicts the Virgin Mary as the woman of the Apocalypse described in Revelation 12 — clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, surrounded by a circle of cherubs and small angels with attributes of her purity. Murillo's Conceptions established the canonical visual treatment of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in Spanish religious painting; the basic composition (the standing Virgin in white robes and a blue mantle, gaze upturned, hands folded at the breast or extended in a gesture of openness, surrounded by cherubs against a luminous golden ground) became, through Murillo's repeated workshop production and through the engraved reproductions that followed, the standard Spanish-Catholic image of the Conception for the next two centuries. The doctrine itself was not formally defined as Catholic dogma until 1854, almost two centuries after Murillo's death; his paintings were the principal visual carriers of the tradition through the intervening centuries.
Bible scenes Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted
Matthew
Luke
Isaiah
