The Prodigal Son squandering his Inheritance

Luke's parable spends one line on the squandering. Murillo gives it a supper table, women leaning in, and at the left a musician bent over a lute, the instrument people actually played at home in the 1660s. He painted this scene twice. The large version belongs to a set of six now in Dublin, and in that canvas a great ruined building once stood in the background before he covered it with paint. When this small canvas, 27 centimetres high, was X-rayed, the ruin was never there at all, so the little one came while the big ones were being finished, or after. That makes it a ricordo, a record the painter kept for himself. In the royal inventory drawn up between 1814 and 1818 it was listed among the pictures held in storage at the Palacio Real in Madrid.