L'Immaculée Conception

Velazquez painted this in Seville around 1618, when he was still a teenager barely out of his apprenticeship and had just married his master's daughter, Juana Pacheco. The subject was the argument of the moment in the city. Seville was fiercely devoted to the idea of the Immaculate Conception, that Mary was conceived free of original sin, and a recent papal ruling in its favour had set off public celebrations. Velazquez paints her not as an abstraction but as a real young Sevillian woman standing on the moon, and some believe Juana herself sat for the face. Below her the small landscape carries her symbols, the sealed garden and the temple. It was one of a pair, and its companion showed Saint John on Patmos, dreaming the vision.