The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Ildefonso

An inventory taken at the palace of La Granja in 1746 lists two canvases by Murillo hanging together in the bedroom of their majesties. One showed Saint Bernard before the Virgin. The other is this, over three metres tall, in which the Virgin lays a chasuble on the shoulders of Ildefonsus, archbishop of Toledo in the seventh century, who had written in defence of her perpetual virginity. The pair moved to the oratory of the royal palace in Madrid, where in 1794 the two together were valued at 140,000 reales, and the canvas reached the museum in 1819. Murillo painted it around 1655. The vestment holds the middle of the picture and he gives the cloth its full weight of colour and texture, since it is the thing that joins the two halves of the scene, the woman arriving in light and the bishop kneeling under her hands. Off to the right an old woman holds a lighted candle, a figure the museum's catalogue was still pointing out to visitors in 1857.