Mater Dolorosa

In the Seville of Murillo's day a religious picture had a job to do: move ordinary worshippers to feel their faith in the body, as the Counter-Reformation church wanted. This is Mary as the Mother of Sorrows, alone in the dark, weeping for her condemned son, and Murillo paints her with almost no props at all, letting a warm light fall on the face and on the clasped hands where all the grief collects. He was the most beloved painter in a city still scarred by the great plague of 1649, which had killed a huge share of its people, and images like this gave that grief somewhere to rest. The painting stayed in Seville and came to its Museo de Bellas Artes in 1949, the gift of a local marchioness.