Il Bambino Gesù

This small panel was not made to hang on a wall. It was the little door of a tabernacle, the box that held the consecrated host, on an altar of Saint Joseph in a Seville convent. Zurbaran painted the Christ Child alone, one hand raised in blessing, in a silvery-blue tunic against a warm sky. In Counter-Reformation Seville this kind of single, tender image of the child was everywhere, meant to be prayed to up close rather than admired from the nave. Zurbaran was the city's leading painter of such things in the 1630s, supplying monastery after monastery. The panel later left Spain entirely and now belongs to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.