The Immaculate Conception

This canvas changed hands in the 1830s, when the Spanish state closed the monasteries and took their contents. The paintings collected in Madrid went into a new national museum installed in an emptied Trinitarian convent, and when that museum was dissolved in 1872 everything in it passed to the Prado. That is how a devotional Immaculate Conception from around 1665, a little over one and a half metres tall, acquired a state inventory number. Antolinez painted this subject again and again, changing the number of angels and the way their heads cluster. Here the Virgin's cloak lifts as if a gale had caught it while her face stays turned away and absorbed, the profile drawn to a point in a manner the museum's catalogue traces back to Alonso Cano, the painter and sculptor from Granada. The flowers are the freest passage in the picture.