Le Miracle des pains et des poissons

Seville in Murillo's day was still recovering from catastrophe. The plague of 1649 had killed something close to half the city, and out of that horror a brotherhood of charity took on the work of burying the dead and feeding the poor from its own almshouse. In the 1670s the brothers hired Murillo, one of their own members, to fill their church with scenes of mercy, and this small quick sketch is his plan for one of them. It shows Christ multiplying five loaves and two fishes to feed a hungry crowd of thousands, the very thing the building itself did every day. Murillo worked the idea out here on a strip of canvas barely a foot high. The finished version, wide as a wall, still hangs in that same Seville almshouse today.