耶稣受难

This is a small painting, only about 20 inches tall, and it was made as a working study for a much larger Crucifixion that now hangs in the Prado in Madrid. Murillo painted it in Seville in the mid-1670s, near the end of his life, when he was the city's leading painter and its religious confraternities kept him busy with altarpieces. He sets the scene after the sun has gone down. The sky is bruised and streaked with moonlight, Jerusalem sits dim in the distance, and Christ's body hangs slack against the dark. The soft, smoky handling was meant for private prayer at close range rather than for a church wall. The canvas may be the little Crucifixion once owned by Sebastian Martinez, the Cadiz collector whose own portrait Goya painted.