The Immaculate Conception

Murillo's Immaculate Conception of around 1680 at the Cleveland Museum represents one of the final treatments of his defining subject — the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin had been passionately defended in Seville since the early seventeenth century, when Sevillians had fought in the streets over the Immaculist and Maculate factions. Murillo's approximately twenty paintings of this subject, spanning his entire career, constitute the most comprehensive visual treatment of the Immaculata doctrine in the history of art, each one refining his ascending composition of the Virgin in light above the world. By 1680 his mastery of the subject was absolute: the luminous sky filling the upper two-thirds of the canvas, the Virgin's figure weightless in its upward movement, the cherubs' arrangement supporting and celebrating rather than anchoring her. The Cleveland version entered American collections through the global dispersal of Murillo's work after the Napoleonic requisitions opened the Spanish market to international collectors throughout the nineteenth century.

Murillo's late, vaporous technique creates an almost immaterial quality, with the Virgin's figure emerging from soft clouds of warm golden light. The brushwork is remarkably free and atmospheric, dissolving firm contours into luminous passages that suggest heavenly transcendence.