Bartolomé Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (b. Seville, 1617—d. Seville, 1682) was a painter of considerable renown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent figures of the so-called Spanish Golden Age. Most of his oeuvre was produced in his hometown of Seville, a city whose history, cultural milieu, distinctive character, and pictorial traditions exerted a profound influence on his artistic style, which is categorized as part of the “full Baroque” movement. Much of his oeuvre was devoted to religious subjects, encompassing both pictorial cycles for ecclesiastical institutions and public hospitals, as well as devotional painting. However, his artistic repertoire also extended to landscapes and portraits, and his genre paintings, particularly those depicting children, are noteworthy for their precocious originality. Murillo is particularly noted for the friendliness, grace, and popularity of his religious images, which were painted with a singular optimism and gentleness within the naturalism of the Spanish school as an expressive strategy and in anticipation of his public’s expectations. His oeuvre was informed by a substantial corpus of Flemish and Italian (as well as Spanish) visual sources, and his ability to depict characters and emotions through the gestural rhetoric of his figures and the emotional selection he made in determining the tone from which to approach his subjects is particularly noteworthy. He is best known today for his paintings of the Immaculate Conception and his paintings of children. In stylistic terms, Murillo’s pictorial output during his youth (until around 1655) developed within the most “canonical” naturalism, influenced by Ribera, Zurbarán, and Roelas. However, Murillo began to exhibit signs of what would become his most recognizable style during these years, which came to the fore especially after the return to Seville of Herrera “The Younger” in the 1650s. Murillo’s brushstroke began to loosen and his colors and treatment of light became softer and more harmonious, at which time his figures and themes reached their maximum degree of expressiveness and narrative through gesture (revealing the influence of works by artists such as Rubens, Reni, Raphael, Van Dyck, Vaccaro, Cavarozzi, and Stefano della Bella, among others). It was between this decade and 1682 that Murillo produced some of his best-known and most celebrated devotional paintings and pictorial cycles, such as the canvases in the church of Santa María la Blanca, the cycle of the Capuchins in Seville, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, and that of La Caridad in Seville. From the eighteenth century onwards, Murillo’s renown in Europe increased exponentially, and significant collections were amassed in England, Russia, and Germany. In the nineteenth century, following the Napoleonic invasions, Murillo established himself as the most sought-after and internationally renowned Spanish artist, particularly in France. However, in the latter half of the century, his historiographical fortunes underwent a precipitous decline, leading to his near obscurity until the twentieth century. Acknowledgments: Thanks to Benito Navarrete Prieto for his support and help in writing this article. This research is the result of a grant from the Ministry of Universities (FPU22/01809) to carry out a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Benito Navarrete Prieto, and is part of the research project CIRIMA: Circulation of the image in the artistic geography of the Hispanic world in the Modern Age (UCM) (PID2020-112808GB-100 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).