The Immaculate Conception

This picture belongs to the final decade of Murillo's career, a period of sustained productivity in Seville when commissions from the Church and Franciscan institutions placed him at the center of Spanish religious painting. Baroque staging, dramatic chiaroscuro and theatrical upward movement are the period's common currency, but Murillo distinguished himself from contemporaries by softening Caravaggesque contrast into a warmer, more diffused glow. His handling of the Immaculate Conception subject, which the Council of Trent had elevated to devotional centrality and which remained contested doctrine until 1854, gave the theme its most popular visual form in 17th-century Spain. Murillo returned to the composition repeatedly across his career; the late versions, of which this is among the most ambitious, replace the crisp architectural clarity of his earlier work with an atmospheric quality that later writers would call vaporoso, a vaporous dissolution of edges that anticipates the tonal freedoms of the 18th century. The painting entered the canon of European religious art and became one of the most frequently engraved and reproduced Marian images of the Baroque period, exercising influence well into the 19th century.