Ecce Homo (Murillo)

Murillo painted for a city that had just been gutted. The plague of 1649 killed something close to half of Seville, and its churches wanted images of suffering that ordinary people could pray to directly. This Ecce Homo shows Christ alone after being shown to the crowd, crowned with thorns, head bowed, made for close private devotion rather than grandeur. It hung for a long time in a chapel of Seville Cathedral. Then it began to travel. In the 19th century it passed to Louis-Philippe, the French king, then into British collections, and in the 20th it crossed the Atlantic with the American collector Samuel Kress, who gave it to a museum in El Paso, Texas, where it hangs today.