Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

1617 - 1682 • Spanish • Painter • Baroque

"Murillo was so modest that it might be said he died from pure modesty." - Antonio Palomino, 1724

Murillo founded the Academy of Seville in 1660 and was the leading painter in that city as ZURBURAN's popularity declined. While his work was also predominantly religious, Murillo's style and subjects were very different from his forerunner's. Instead of painting ascetics and martyrs, he painted gentler scenes, favoring the Immaculate Conception and rendering it as if following PACHEO's instructions to show the Virgin as the loveliest of all women (though certainly older than the prescribed 12 or 13 years of age). For the most part, as his art matured, Murillo's colors were soft, his faces kind, and his touch eloquent. His biographer, Palomino, a Spanish painter of modest skill and success, defended both Murillo and national art in general. Insisting that Madrid was the farthest from his home that Murillo ever went, Palomino wrote , "The fact is that foreigners do not want to concede fame to any Spanish painter who has not passed through an Italian customhouse." As for the modesty mentioned in the quotation above, Palomino goes on to explain that, after falling off the scaffolding while painting a large picture of Saint Catherine, in order not to show weakness and because of his great modesty, Murillo would not let himself be examined and died from the accident. The tale concludes, "And he was such a generous man that when he died they found that in spite of all the many famous works he did, the only money he had was 100 reales that he had received the day before and sixty pesos in a drawer."