Le Bon Pasteur

Murillo painted this in Seville around 1660, and the parable of the good shepherd is here made small and plain. Instead of a grown Christ he gives us the Christ Child, a barefoot toddler resting a shepherd's staff under one arm, a single lamb pressed against his leg. What sets the scene is behind him. He sits among classical ruins, a piece of a fallen building and further back a broken column tipped on its side. Those aren't decoration. In Murillo's Catholic Seville they read as the collapse of the pagan Roman world, the old order toppled and the child's teaching standing on its rubble. Murillo built the image from a print by the Florentine engraver Stefano della Bella, but the tenderness in the child's face is his own, the thing he was famous for. The picture passed through Spanish royal hands, bought in 1744 for Elisabeth Farnese, and hangs today in the Prado in Madrid.