São José e o Menino Jesus

For most of the Middle Ages Joseph sat at the edge of the picture, an old man dozing while the important things happened. Spanish reformers changed that. Teresa of Avila, who died in 1582, dedicated nearly all her new convents to him and pushed his cult hard, and by Murillo's time Seville wanted Joseph shown young and dark-bearded, a working father. Here the child stands on his knee and both their hands close on the flowering rod that identifies him. Murillo painted the pair many times; this version comes from around 1670 to 1675, near the end of his life. It reached Florida through John Ringling, the circus owner who spent the 1920s buying Baroque paintings in Europe and built a museum in Sarasota for them, where it hangs near the four huge Rubens tapestry cartoons he is better remembered for.