San Diego de Alcalá ante la cruz

Around 1645 Murillo was a young painter in Seville, not yet thirty and barely known, when he won his first big job: a cycle of large canvases for the cloister of the Franciscan monastery there. It made his reputation. This panel belongs to that series. Its subject is San Diego of Alcala, a Franciscan lay brother who worked as a gardener and was known for slipping into long spells of prayer. Here he kneels before the cross, lost in it, while church dignitaries arrive to see him and he does not so much as notice them. Murillo would go on to fill Seville with tender, softly lit religious pictures like this one. The cycle itself was broken up and scattered during the Napoleonic wars in Spain, which is how this piece came to hang in a museum in Toulouse.