Our Lady of the Rosary

Murillo's Our Lady of the Rosary of around 1650 at the Goya Museum is an early devotional image reflecting the intense rosary devotion promoted by the Dominican order throughout Counter-Reformation Spain. The rosary as a form of prayer had been associated with the Virgin's own recommendation, and Dominican confraternities throughout Spain maintained elaborate rosary devotions that required images of the Madonna with her rosary for their altars and processions. Murillo's early Marian images of this period show him developing the visual language of celestial luminosity and maternal tenderness that would become his defining contribution to Spanish religious art. Where his early works still show the influence of Velázquez's tonal restraint and Zurbarán's austere solemnity, the 1650 Madonna paintings already reveal the warmer, more emotionally accessible approach that he would perfect across the next three decades. The Goya Museum's holding in Castres, France, reflects the French collecting enthusiasm for Spanish Baroque art that made Murillo one of the most sought-after painters in French collections through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Murillo renders the Virgin with characteristic warmth and gentle modeling, the blue mantle and rosary beads carefully painted against a luminous background. His developing vaporoso technique begins to soften the firmer outlines of his earlier naturalistic manner.