Saint Augustine between Christ and the Virgin

The picture you are looking at is taller than the one Murillo delivered. It was painted around 1665, most likely for the Augustinian convent in Seville, and about a century later somebody sewed a strip onto the top of the canvas and filled it with small angels that spill down into the older paint. The addition has been credited to the Sevillian painter Alonso Miguel Tovar, who died in 1758, though the Prado puts that as a supposition. Augustine kneels in his black friar's habit between Christ and the Virgin, receiving blood from the wound in one and milk from the other. The scene is not a vision he reported but a meditation an apocryphal text put in his mouth: caught between the two, he did not know which way to turn. At the left, his books are painted as a small still life.