The Patrician's Dream

The story here is an old Roman one. In the 4th century the Virgin supposedly appeared to a childless couple and told them to build a church wherever they found snow, and the next morning, in the heat of a Roman August, snow lay on the Esquiline hill. Murillo painted this around 1665 for a church in Seville, Santa Maria la Blanca, which had just been remodelled from a medieval synagogue. He shows the patrician Juan asleep in a chair beside his wife, the Virgin and Child floating in a burst of light above them, and off in the distance the tiny procession climbing the snow-covered hill to mark out the ground for Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.