Moses at the Rock of Horeb

Murillo painted this for a particular wall and a particular purpose. The Brotherhood of Charity in Seville ran a hospice for the poor and the dying, and it commissioned a set of pictures on the acts of mercy for its church. This was the panel for giving drink to the thirsty: Moses strikes the rock in the desert, water breaks out of it, and the crowd surges in, children and animals among them, grabbing at the flow. Seville knew that kind of desperation at first hand. A plague in 1649 had killed something close to half the city, and the hospital existed to feed and water the people the streets had given up on. Murillo, who had joined the brotherhood himself in 1665, finished it around 1670, and it still hangs where he meant it to.