MURILLO, Bartolomé Esteban

Spanish painter, active for almost all his life in his native Seville. His early career is not well documented, but he started working in a naturalistic tenebrist style, showing the influence of Zurbaran. After making his reputation with a series of eleven paintings on the lives of Franciscan saints for the Franciscan monasteryGLOSSARYthe complex of buildings used by a community of monks. Among the main elements of the complex are the church, cloister, chapter house (used by the governing body), refectory (dining room) and dormitory (sleeping quarters). in Seville (1645-46, the pictures are now dispersed in Spain and elsewhere), he displaced Zurbaran as the city's leading painter and was unrivalled in this position for the rest of his life.

Most of his paintings are of religious subjects, appealing strongly to popular piety and illustrating the doctrines of the Counter-ReformationGLOSSARYTerm in ecclesiastical history referring to the reform of the entire Church which was widely believed to be necessary as early as the late Middle Ages. Reform programs, such as those passed by the Councils of Constance (1414-1418) and Basle (1431-1437 and 1448) or the 5th Lateran Council (1512-1517), did not achieve any lasting results. Not until the Protestant Reformation were the Pope and Roman Curia forced to take specific action against abuse of position, declining moral standards, the selling of indulgences and excesses in the worship of saints and relics. With the Laetere Jerusalem (1544) bull. Pope Paul III (1534-1549) was responsible for the convocation of the Council of Trent which, in three separate sessions between 15445 and 1563, started the process of inner reform in the Church. church, above all the Immaculate Conception, which was his favourite theme. His mature style was very different to that seen in his early works; it is characterized by idealized figures, soft, melting forms, delicate colouring, and sweetness of expression and mood. The term 'estilo vaporoso' (vaporous style) is often used of it. Murillo also painted genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. scenes of beggar children that have a similar sentimental appeal, but his fairly rare portraits are strikingly different in feeling - much more sombre and intellectual (an outstanding self-portrait is in the National GalleryGLOSSARYan upper story, similar to a tribune, running along the side of a building and open on one side to the interior; in a church (basilica) above the side aisles, over the ambulatory (central-plan building) and also over the west end. The gallery was used to keep certain groups of worshippers apart (women, noblemen)., London).

In 1660, with the collaboration of Valdés Leal and Francisco Herrera the Younger, Murillo founded an academy of painting at Seville and became its first president. He died at Seville in 1682, evidently from the after-effects of a fall from scaffolding. He had many assistants and followers, and his style continued to influence Sevillian painting into the 19th century. His fame in the 18th century and early 19th century was enormous. With Ribera he was the only Spanish painter who was widely known outside his own country and he was ranked by many critics amongst the greatest artists of all time. Later his reputation plummeted, and he was dismissed as facile and sugary, but now that his own work is being distinguished from that of his numerous imitators his star is rising again.