The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables

The Immaculate Conception of Soult, also known as The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables, is one of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's major paintings from his later years. The Virgin stands in a white dress and blue cloak, hands crossed over her chest, treading on the moon and gazing upward. Murillo repeated this formula in many of his Immaculate Conceptions, but here the composition rises with a dynamic upward thrust typical of the Baroque, placing Mary in a luminous realm of clouds and angels and blending the iconography of the Immaculate Conception with that of the Assumption.

A striking feature is the absence of the symbols drawn from the Litany of Loreto, the Marian prayer often associated with such images. Those symbols do appear on the original frame, a carved and polychrome moulding that Marshal Soult left at the Sevillian hospital when he took the painting. In their place Murillo filled the canvas with a great host of angels in varied poses, painted with loose brushwork that dissolves the figures into the heavenly atmosphere. The faces, closer to the human types of his time than to classical beauty, show a measured idealisation that makes the scene feel unusually approachable.

The work is linked to the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville, according to the tradition recorded by Ceán Bermúdez, and its alternative name comes from its removal from Spain during the Peninsular War, when Marshal Soult took it to France in 1813. After an auction in 1852, the Louvre acquired it for a sum very high for the period, and it remained there for nearly a century. Its transfer to Madrid in 1941, as part of an exchange with the Vichy regime, eventually brought it to the Prado. Today it stands as evidence of Murillo's maturity and of the changing critical fortunes of his work, which lost prestige against other masters before regaining it.

Painter

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Date

1660

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

274 × 190 cm

Museum

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Movement

Baroque

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Mary, woman

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