流泪的圣彼得

Seville had just come through the worst year in its history. The plague of 1649 carried off something close to half the city, and the parishes and confraternities that survived spent the next decade replacing what they had lost. Murillo was in his early thirties and took a great deal of that work. This canvas belongs to those years, around 1650 to 1655. Peter sits alone on a rock after denying Christ three times, hands locked together, head tipped back, eyes running, a book and a key on a ribbon beside him. The weeping Peter was among the most requested subjects in Spanish painting of the century, an image of repentance meant for private devotion rather than an altar. The picture lost his name for a long stretch. It passed through a Dutch auction and a series of Italian and Spanish collections as a Ribera before the attribution to Murillo was proposed and accepted. It is now in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, at 148 by 104 centimetres.