La Vergine bambina

Zurbaran painted this in Seville in the early 1630s, at the height of his work for the city's convents and monasteries. It shows the Virgin Mary not as a mother but as a child, a girl of perhaps eight or nine, pausing over her needlework. She has set down her sewing and pressed her hands together, her eyes lifted, caught in a moment of quiet prayer. Around her Zurbaran arranges plain, everyday things, a workbasket, flowers, a couple of books, each carrying a soft symbolic charge. The light falls gently on her face and hands and leaves the rest of the room in shadow.