The Immaculate Conception

In Zurbarán's Seville the Immaculate Conception was not yet church doctrine, and the city was campaigning hard to have it declared one. Confraternities swore oaths to defend it, the town council sent envoys to Rome, and painters were asked for the image over and over. Zurbarán supplied it many times without repeating himself, and this canvas of around 1635 is where he broke his own pattern. In the closely related versions in the Prado and in Sigüenza the young Virgin presses her hands together, lowers her eyes and stays strictly frontal. Here she opens her arms, turns her body and raises her gaze, so that the whole figure reads as rising. She stands on an upturned crescent moon and a cluster of angel heads, with the symbols of the Litany of Loreto scattered through the landscape below and among the clouds. Scholars knew nothing of the picture until it surfaced in London in 1972, and it reached the Prado in 2015 among the 25 paintings given by the collector Plácido Arango.