Christ healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda

Murillo painted this for a working hospital. In the late 1660s the Brotherhood of Charity in Seville, led by a reformed nobleman named Miguel de Manara, ran a hospice for the sick and dying poor, and they asked Murillo for a series of large canvases on the theme of mercy. This was one of them. It shows the pool of Bethesda, where, in John's Gospel, an invalid had waited 38 years for a cure until Christ tells him simply to rise and walk. Hung in that hospital church, the scene spoke straight to the patients being carried past it. Murillo keeps the miracle quiet. There is no crowd of astonished witnesses, only the ragged man on his mat and the figure standing over him among the arches of the portico.