Saint Francis Xavier

Murillo's Saint Francis Xavier celebrates the Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to India and Japan and was canonized alongside Ignatius Loyola in 1622. Francis Xavier was a particular object of Jesuit devotion and a popular subject for altarpieces commissioned by Jesuit institutions across Catholic Europe. Murillo's Sevillian workshops received many such commissions from religious houses, and his warm, approachable representations of saints made him the dominant devotional painter of 17th-century Spain.

Xavier is shown in the black Jesuit habit, his gaze directed upward in a moment of divine inspiration. Murillo's characteristic vaporous sky background and warm light give the figure a spiritual luminosity. The saint's face is painted with the gentle idealization that defines Murillo's devotional types.