天使报喜

Murillo worked in Seville in the years after 1649, when plague swept the city and killed something close to half its people. The Seville that survived wanted images to pray with that were gentle rather than grand, and Murillo built much of his career on exactly that, soft and tender holy figures a frightened congregation could love. Here the angel Gabriel comes to Mary with the news that she will bear Christ, the scene from the first chapter of Luke. She sets down her sewing and lowers her eyes, hands to her chest. The lilies stand for her purity and the workbasket for the ordinary domestic life about to change completely. Light breaks in from the upper left with the dove of the Holy Spirit, the one openly heavenly note in a room that otherwise looks like a real Sevillian home.