The Flight into Egypt

This was an early work by a young painter in Seville, made around 1650. Those were hard years for the city. The plague of 1649 had killed a huge share of its people, and Seville was full of the poor and the displaced. Murillo tells the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt, but he paints them life-size and completely human. Mary is an ordinary mother watching her sleeping baby. Joseph is an everyman, worried, trying to get his family to safety. There is no glow of the miraculous here. It is a family on a road at night, which almost anyone in Seville that year would have recognised.