The Immaculate Conception as a Child

For most of the 20th century this picture carried the wrong date. An old restoration had gone over the figures of the signature, and what is now read as a five was read as a one, so the canvas passed as 1616, the work of a teenager just starting out. Only in 1988 was it put back where it belongs, 1656, near the end of a long career. That changes what you are looking at. The soft light, the blues and whites, the loosened contrasts are the choices of a painter in his late fifties who had spent decades cutting figures out of blackness. The Virgin is shown as a small child, hands crossed on her chest, carried up on a bank of angel heads.