Saint Roderick

The priest in this picture died more than 700 years before Murillo painted him. Roderick lived in Cordoba in the 9th century, when the city was the capital of Muslim Spain, and he was executed in the year 857 for refusing to give up his Christian faith. Murillo, working in Seville in Catholic Spain, shows him at the instant of his reward rather than his death. A small angel leans in to set a crown of roses on his head, which is why he tilts his face up, and that motion exposes the thin cut across his throat where he was beheaded. In his hands are a priest's cap and the palm branch that in this tradition marks a martyr. A single shaft of light lifts the figure out of the dark, a device Murillo favoured in his later years.