Die Vision des Fray Lauterio

This is an early work by Murillo, painted around 1640 for a Dominican convent in his home city of Seville. It tells a small scholarly miracle. A Franciscan friar, Lauterio, is stuck on a passage he cannot understand in the great theology of Thomas Aquinas, and prays to Saint Francis for help. Francis, on the left, answers by pointing him toward Aquinas himself, shown in the centre beneath the Virgin and a ring of angels. Murillo was still in his early twenties and largely unknown here, years before the tender religious pictures that made him the most famous painter in Seville. When the convent was dissolved the canvas travelled, and it reached the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge in 1879 as a gift.