The Immaculate Conception

Seville in the 1620s was gripped by a single theological question. The city wanted Rome to declare that the Virgin had been conceived free of original sin, and the campaign was everywhere, in public oaths, processions, university vows and hundreds of commissioned paintings. Zurbaran painted the subject something like 16 times.

This is the young version of it, the Virgin shown as a girl, standing on a crescent moon with three small clusters of angel heads gathered under her cloak and tunic.

The canvas spent years in Jadraque, north of Madrid, given to a parish school there in 1952 and moved on to the diocesan museum at Siguenza. Its date is still argued over. The traditional reading ties it to a Seville commission of 1630, while Odile Delenda, who catalogued the painter's work, places it about five years later.