Due donne alla finestra

Murillo painted this around 1670 in Seville, a city that had lost roughly half its people to plague not twenty years earlier. Against that, here is something startlingly light. Two young women lean at an open window, one grinning openly at us, the other half hiding her laugh behind a shawl. The way the frame is cut, we the viewers are whatever they are looking at and smiling about. Spanish audiences would have caught a sly edge, there was a proverb that a woman at the window was a grape on the street, hinting the pair might be for sale. Murillo leaves it teasing rather than certain. What stayed with people was the sheer immediacy, and printmakers copied those two faces again and again through the next two centuries.