San Giovannino con l'agnello

Murillo made this in Seville in the early 1660s for one of his closest patrons, Justino de Neve, a canon of the city's cathedral. The child is the young John the Baptist, shown hugging a lamb and pointing upward, the lamb standing for Christ and the gesture recalling his later words, 'Behold the Lamb of God.' In 1665 de Neve lent it to the newly rebuilt church of Santa Maria la Blanca, where it hung beside Murillo's great Immaculate Conception for the opening festivities. Seville had been gutted by plague a few years before, and warm, human, approachable pictures of this kind were exactly what its churches wanted. So many engravings were copied from it that the pointing child turned up in homes and print-shops far beyond Spain.