Le Christ crucifié

Murillo painted this crucified Christ around 1677, in his last years in Seville, a city that had been gutted by plague in 1649 and never recovered its old wealth. It is a small canvas, a little over 70 centimetres tall, meant for private prayer rather than a great altar. He sets the single figure against a dark, clouded sky and lets a soft light model the body, the torso given a slight twist that lifts it away from the flat plane of the cross. There is no crowd, no city, nothing to fix the scene in a place. Murillo died a few years later after a fall from scaffolding while at work on another altarpiece.