The Infant Christ Distributing Bread to the Pilgrims

The Infant Christ Distributing Bread to the Pilgrims of around 1678 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest is a late work that shows Murillo's estilo vaporoso — the 'vaporous style' of his final years — at its most fully developed. The subject of the Christ child performing a charitable miracle combined two of his most consistently explored themes: the miraculous childhood of Jesus and the Eucharistic theology of bread as divine gift. The soft atmospheric modeling of his late style gave the miraculous subject an appropriate quality of visionary unreality, the figures existing in a space more atmospheric than physical, the light suffusing rather than illuminating. Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts, one of Central Europe's great art institutions, received this painting through the European collecting networks that distributed Murillo's work from Spain across the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The painting's presence in Hungary testifies to the depth and breadth of Catholic devotional culture that created demand for Murillo's imagery far beyond Spain.

Murillo's late style is fully evident in the dissolved outlines and luminous atmospheric effects that envelop the figures. The palette of warm golds and soft blues creates a vision of divine charity rendered with extraordinary tenderness.