A Knight of Alcántara or Calatrava

Murillo is remembered for soft-edged Madonnas and ragged Seville street children, so this stiff, full-length grandee comes as a surprise. It is thought to be his earliest portrait of this kind, painted around 1650, before a trip to Madrid in 1658 let him study court portraiture at first hand. Here he works in the manner of his older Seville contemporary Zurbarán: hard light, flat planes of colour, a figure set against near-darkness. The man wears the cross of a Spanish military order, though even the museum cannot say which, since the badges of Alcántara and Calatrava look so alike that the title keeps both. His name is lost as well. The one thing that dates him precisely is his dress, for the interlaced sleeves and gloves were already old-fashioned by the 1650s, kept most likely because such finery was costly enough to reuse.