The Flower Girl

Murillo painted this smiling girl in Seville in the 1660s, in a city still thinned by the great plague of 1649 that had killed close to half its people. She holds out pink and white roses, and she was made as Spring, one of a set of the seasons for a canon of Seville Cathedral. She has been read as a flower seller, a Gypsy girl, even the painter's own daughter, who later became a nun. What is certain is stranger. When the canvas was X-rayed, another picture surfaced beneath her, the lower half of a Virgin from an Immaculate Conception that Murillo had abandoned. It is the earliest proof we have that he reused his own canvases. Turn the painting on its side and the buried Madonna lines up almost exactly with a finished version now in Madrid.