The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard

This tells a medieval legend that Counter-Reformation Spain still loved. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century monk and writer, was at his desk one night praising the Virgin when she is said to have appeared and given him a few drops of milk from her breast, a sign of grace for his devotion. Murillo painted the scene around 1655 for a convent in Seville, on a canvas over three metres tall, so that a kneeling worshipper would meet the vision almost life-size. He was in his late thirties then and becoming the city's leading painter, in a Seville still recovering from the plague of 1649 that had killed perhaps half its people. The tumbling books at Bernard's feet and the soft-lit angels are exactly the warmth his religious pictures were loved for.