San Francesco d'Assisi in preghiera

Murillo was still a young man in Seville when he painted this, a city that lived and breathed the Counter-Reformation, its churches and convents ordering pictures meant to move ordinary worshippers to prayer. He shows Francis of Assisi kneeling on bare rock, hands clasped, a skull and a cross beside him for meditating on death, and on his side you can just make out the stigmata, the wounds said to have marked him like Christ's. Murillo keeps the setting dark and stormy so that the light falling on the saint's upturned face does all the work. Painted for a Spanish audience, it hangs today far to the north, in the great cathedral of Antwerp.