Saint Thomas de Villeneuve guérissant les malades

Thomas of Villanueva was a 16th-century archbishop of Valencia remembered for giving away almost everything he owned to the poor. He was made a saint in 1658, and Seville's Augustinian monastery marked the honour with a full altarpiece on his life, painted by Murillo. This panel, showing the saint healing a crippled man, is one of the pieces that survive. Murillo built his reputation on exactly this kind of image: a solemn holy scene grounded in ordinary, unidealised bodies, the ragged beggar close enough to touch. That naturalism was deliberate. The Counter-Reformation church wanted pictures that moved plain worshippers to pity and to charity, not abstract theology. Murillo spent much of his career in Seville painting its poor children, and the same watchful tenderness runs through this saint's outstretched hand.