圣母无染原罪

No city was more devoted to the idea of the Immaculate Conception than Murillo's Seville. Long before Rome fixed it as doctrine, Sevillians swore public oaths to it and demanded images of it, and Murillo painted the subject again and again, the Virgin young and rising, wrapped in white and blue, carried up on a bank of cloud and cherubs. This version dates from around 1670, in his mature years. Its later life was turbulent. During Napoleon's occupation of Spain a French marshal took it back to Paris with him, and it passed through French hands before eventually leaving the country again. Murillo gives her no throne and no crown, only air and light, a figure who seems to float free of the ground she never touches.