S. Leander and S. Bonaventura

In 1665 Murillo took on the largest job of his life, a whole church full of paintings for the Capuchin friars of Seville, and he was still delivering canvases three years later. This one comes out of that campaign. It puts together two men who lived some 600 years apart. Leander was bishop of Seville in the 6th century, Bonaventure a Franciscan theologian of the 13th, and the pairing is an argument about the ground the friars were standing on, a line drawn from the city's earliest church foundation to their newly built convent. Murillo made the claim legible by putting a small model of the church into the scene. In 1810, with French troops holding Seville, the friars packed the whole series and got it away to Cádiz, and it came back in 1814. Several of those canvases now hang together in one room of the city's fine arts museum.