Devotional paintings

Essays by Brown, Peter Cherry, Jordan, and Claire Berry follow Stratton-Pruitt's introduction, addressing the artist's themes, philosophy, and practices. Brown's lucid and accessible discussion of the artist's devotional paintings reflects the strong presence of these objects in the exhibition. Defining this genre of religious painting as small- to medium-sized works intended for individual experiences in the faith, Brown locates the objects within the history of sacred painting, the Devotio Moderna, and the Ignatian prayer method. He likewise identifies the formal characteristics of devotional images and draws parallels to contemporary prayer manuals. Brown then sheds light on Murillo's reproductions and offers a reason for the painter's overwhelming success in this market. He explains that Murillo's gift was his ability to engage the viewer's emotions through a strategic use of gaze, pose, illumination, and palpable brushwork. Scholars have long accepted Murillo's credentials as a devotional painter, but Brown's discussion is enlightening for its distillation of this category of the artist's oeuvre. Furthermore, as part of the rehabilitation of Murillo, Brown forces the reader to examine his/her assumptions about the role and effect of the paintings. Seen through this lens, works that some have dismissed as trite and uninventive become sophisticated expressions of artistic skill, disegno, and theology.

Beyond a small body of Hispanists, few art historians have paid attention to Murillo's participation in Seville's drawing academy; his academic ideals are certainly lacking in texts employing Murillo's romanticized persona. As remedy, and to locate the artist in the larger European academic tradition, Cherry summarizes the history of the Seville institution and its patronage, and examines its intellectual climate. More importantly, he presents the academy as a later seventeenth-century manifestation of a century-long campaign by Spanish artists for social and professional recognition, whose well-known champion was Velazquez. In doing so, the author dislodges Murillo from his romanticized (and vilified) role as painter of sentiment and intuition, relocates him within contemporary academic culture, and reveals him as the product of theoretical treatises in line with his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. Cherry challenges longstanding notions about Spanish art and its supposed prudishness with his discussion of the philosophical significance of life drawing among the Seville academicians, for whom the nude figure represented the apex of creation and proved the superiority of narrative themes.

Like Cherry, Jordan defends Murillo's currency in his essay on the artist's cabinet paintings. In this case, it is less the painter's intellect than his professional practice that concerns Jordan. The author states that while the literature recognizes selected Italian and northern European artists who created small, gem-like luxury paintings for wealthy patrons, it has been assumed that Spaniards did not generally participate. Once again, the assumption is based on misinformation about Spain and its artists, and specifically the belief that Iberian painters and their patrons were so seized by piety that luxury objects like cabinet paintings held little appeal. Alternately, the presence of these works on inventories could be explained away as imported objects and the reflection of Spain's artistic self-loathing Armed with primary sources, recent conservation reports, and his own connoisseurship skills, Jordan convincingly demonstrates that Murillo produced a substantial repertoire of cabinet paintings, many on metal and stone supports. The author then matches these works to their earliest collectors, including Murillo's patrons Nicolas Omazur and Francisco de Neve. Like Brown, Jordan demands that the reader examine his/her assumptions about even these small works, arguing that the cabinet paintings are not to be dismissed as revealing more about the artist's salesmanship than his artistry. Instead, Jordan ends his essay with a provocative reevaluation of a 1680 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on copper, turning on its head the belief that its vaporous technique revealed it to be a modello or a copy of a monumental work. Instead, Jordan demonstrates that even on this small scale, for this familiar theme, and in his last years, Murillo continued to invent.