|
Bartolome Esteban Murillo
(1617-1682)
|
| Think that you may own a painting by Bartolome Esteban Murillo? We research, appraise and issue Certificates of Authenticity (COA) for all paintings by Bartolome Esteban Murillo.
|
La Immaculada de la Media Luna
|
| Bartolome Esteban Murillo was a Spanish painter who established himself as the painter of “inmaculadas” par excellence. He had plenty of competition. Churches vied for the most splendid immaculate and offered bounteous commissions to that end. The dogma of the “immaculate conception” arose in the Fifth Century, but remained optional until the 17th Century. Around the time of Murillo’s birth the doctrine was elevated to an absolute level, much to the delight of Spaniards who were well-known for their devotion to the Marian cult.
|
Virgin with a Rosary
|
| No artist captured the public religious imagination as completely as Murillo. His “vaporoso” style was admired and much copied. This consisted of presenting the Virgin against a heavenly, mysterious background of radiant light, but emerging from lower and outer darkness. Eyes cast up, she looks toward heaven, and in many of the more than twenty immaculate painted by Murillo she is already above worldly cares, transported upward, trailed by a retinue of cherubs and angels. It is an apotheosis.
|
Immaculate Conception
|
| No fool, Murillo knew that beautiful models merely added to the attraction of his Virgins, and he broke with convention by avoiding blondes. His Virgins look Spanish, dark-haired and olive in complexion. It was a winning formula.
|
La Immaculada Concepcion de Soult
|
| But success did not come easily for Murillo, the son of an impecunious Sevillian artisan. In his twenties he was reduced to painting urchins on market-day, in the garish colors preferred by his modest clients. Low status pictures for a low status market. He was getting nowhere fast. Showing much courage, he set off on foot for Madrid, pleading with the great Velasquez, court painter to Philip IV, for assistance. He got it. Velasquez was generous to his fellow townsman. Murillo made the right contacts, and was able to return to Seville with renewed confidence. A commission from a Francisan convent ensued and, when the works were finished three years later, his future was assured. His career as a religious painter was established.
|
| The conventional view is that Murillo had three stylistic techniques- cold, warm and “vaporoso” (misty). “Cold” he used for common genre subjects- lives of ordinary people. “Warm” was for saints and vaporoso of course for the Virgin Mary. In fact this rigid division is rather arbitrary, as the figures themselves exhibit a firm realism as can be seen in the examples listed here. It is the aura of the painting which varies with the subject: those of the highest religiosity naturally (in the view of 17th Century Spain), deserved the detachment from and superiority to the hard-edged material world found in the inmaculadas. Compare his genre painting "The Young Beggar"(below) with his Virgin Mary’s.
|
The Young Beggar
|
| Today, Murillo’s work is housed all over the world, including at The Louvre in Paris. Still wondering about a devotional painting featuring a vaporoso style hanging in your home? Contact us…it could be by Bartolome Esteban Murillo.
|
| |
 |
|
Back to Artists |
|
|
|
