Murillo, Bartolome Esteban

The family, in which Esteban Bartolome was born, lived in a rented monastery house. The child soon became an orphan: in 1627 his father died, and a year later his mother died, after which the boy ended up in the family of his mother's sister. He studied with Juan del Castillo and initially worked in his dry, tough manner until the arrival in the city of Pedro de Moyi , who had transferred Van Dyck's style there, did not convince him of her dissatisfaction. The desire to cultivate led him to Madrid , where his compatriot, Velasquez , provided him with the opportunity to study and copy in the royal palaces the works of Titian , Rubens , van Dyck and Ribera, and with his free, masterful technique had a strong influence on his development. The years 1642 - 1645 remain the most mysterious in the life of Murillo. In 1645, he returned to Seville as a completely different artist and soon received a large order from the Franciscan monastery. The fulfillment of this order became a kind of report on the years of apprenticeship.

Work on the cycle for the monastery coincided with the creation of a home: in 1645, Murillo entered into marriage with Dona Beatriz Sotomayor-i-Cabrera, who bore him five children. Undoubtedly, the inner emotional life of the artist, reflected in his work, was subject to the rhythms of family life. Until 1633, the creative evolution of the master was a dynamic movement forward. After the death of his wife on January 1, 1664, Murillo worked for two years rather slowly. Gradually, he moved to a new stage in his life, the beginning of which laid a large order for the church of Santa Maria la Blanca, which became a subsidiary parish of the Seville Cathedral . For some time the artist lived in a Capuchin monastery, where he was asked to decorate the entire altar wall. In May 1665, Murillo was accepted into the Brotherhood of Mercy. The reward received by the painter for his work for the Brotherhood did not affect Murillo’s inherent moderate lifestyle. Soon he released the will of a slave who grew up in his house.

In 1682, Murillo, who had not left Seville since his trip to Madrid , came to Cadiz in order to perform the big altar painting for the Capuchin monastery there: “Teaching of St. Catherine. While working on it, he inadvertently fell off the stage and hurt himself so much that he had to go back immediately to Seville, where he died as a result of this fall on April 3 of the same year; The Cadiz picture was written by his student Osorio.

Fame came to Murillo in 1645 with the execution of the order of 11 paintings for the local monastery of the Order of the Franciscans. The main ones are: “St. Diego fills the poor ”( Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando , Madrid ),“ The Miracle of St. Diego ", or the so-called" Kitchen of the Angels "( Louvre , Paris )," Death of St. Clara "( Dresden Gallery )," Plague "(in Herz. Pozzo di Borgo, Paris) and" St. Diego, which turns bread into roses ”(from C. Curtis, New York ). Already in these works, despite the heavyness and sharpness of their tones, the coloristic inclination and the national, specially Seville character of Murillo, who takes the models and models for his figures from the people, are vividly expressed.

Much smoother and more harmonious in colors, written by him for the Seville Cathedral “St. Leander "and" St. Isidore "(both in the sacristy of this cathedral), and two main in the series of works of the middle pore of his activity," Christmas of the Virgin "( 1655 ; Louvre) and" Vision of St. Anthony of Padua "( 1656 ; Seville Cathedral ). In 1665, Murillo was occupied with works for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca in Seville, of which four semicircular paintings can be considered as the most important: “Triumphant Church” (belonged to Pourtales, 30 years ago in Paris), “Immaculate Conception” (in Louvre Museum), “The Basilica of S.-Maria Maggiore, in Rome” (in Madrid, Acad. Arts) and “The Dream of the Roman Senator” (ibid.). In 1668, the magnificent “Blessed Virgin in the clouds with eight gazes looking at her, the saints” came out from under the brush of Murillo (in the hall of the headquarters of the Seville cathedral), and in 1670 - one of his best creations in the colorful respect, “St. Family with sv. Elizabeth and John the Baptist ”(in the Louvre Museum). From the second of the just mentioned years, the most productive period of Murillo’s work begins. In 1674 , he graduated from eight large paintings ordered for the church of the “de la Caridad” hospital and depicting feats of Christian charity — works that are as great in design, perspective and color as in the composition and expressiveness of figures and faces.

Three of them, so called. “Thirst” (“La Sed”; Moses exudes water from the rock), “Multiplication of loaves and fish” and “St. Juan de Dios, carrying patients ", remained in its original place, while others scattered in different collections. In 1675-76 Murillo wrote more than 20 paintings for the Capuchin monastery of Seville; 17 of them, including the most remarkable: “The Most Pure Virgin in Glory”, “St. Anthony with the Savior Baby "and" St. Francis is in ecstasy ”, they now adorn the museum of this city. Approximately by the same time the “ Immaculate Conception ” belongs, belonging to the same museum and representing almost the most masterful image of the plot, repeatedly interpreted by the artist. In 1678 , he performed several paintings for the Seville hospital “de los Venerables Sacerdotes” translated into Russian as “honorable clergymen”, among other things, “The Virgin in Glory”, which is one of the main treasures of the Louvre Museum.

All the works of Murillo, there are over 450 (by Curtis, 481; by Lefora, 478). Their content is mainly religious. A significant group among them are images of a special type created by him, dedicated to the glorification of Our Lady and known as the Immaculate Conception (“La Inmaculada Concepción”), “Ascension” (“La Asunción”) and “La Purísima”. In the works of this kind (some of their number was mentioned above) Madonna is in the form of a girl or a young maiden standing or floating in the air, among the clouds, and surrounded by a host of cheering babes, angels, often with a moon crescent or a globe under their feet, with an inimitable expression of virginal purity, gentleness, prayerful emotion and unearthly bliss conveyed in the pose and face.

As in these pictures, and in his other religious works, Murillo strikes with the freedom, courage, and strength with which his fiery animation with ideal themes translates into realistic, national-Spanish forms. The ardor of fantasy sometimes prevents him from being stylish in composition, but he is always full of life and excellent in color and light and shade. At the beginning of the average period of his creativity, his color reaches to the rare wealth of warm local colors saturated with light, which later, in the era of full development of his skill, lead to one light, airy-transparent general tone that could not be more appropriate to his spiritualistic, supernatural plots. Murillo also wrote highly realistic genres from Seville’s common folk life, known as “Street Kids” - boys and girls eating food, playing dice, counting small coins, selling fruit, etc. Such pictures can be seen in the Louvre Museum , Munich Pinakothek, in the Hermitage, in Budapest and many other galleries. Of the works of Murillo, not mentioned in the previous lines, especially remarkable: "Rebekah and Eleazar" and "Raising of the Virgin", in the Madrid Museum; Madonna of the Dresden Gallery, Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Palazzo Corsini in Rome, the Seville and Madrid museums; "The Baby John the Baptist with the Lamb", in the London National Gallery; “Vision of sv. Anthony, in the Berlin Museum; "Rest of sv. Families on the way to Egypt ”,“ Immaculate Conception ”,“ Death of Peter Arbuez ”and“ Vision of Sts. Anthony ”, in the Hermitage, in which in general there are 20 paintings by this famous Spanish artist.

Murillo was also engaged in landscape and landscape painting. When established in Seville, in 1660, the Academy of Arts , in which the study of the naked human body was first officially introduced, it was made its director, as a result, and even more thanks to his high talent and fame, he had a strong influence on many painters of the local school . Of his direct students, the most prominent are M. Osorio, S. Gomez and Villavicencio, and among imitators A.-M. de Tobar, X. de Valdes Leal .

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  The boy with the dog. Hermitage

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  Archangel Raphael with Bishop Domonte. Pushkin Museum to them. A.S. Pushkin , Moscow

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  Saint Isidore of Seville

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  Holy Family with John the Baptist

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  "Rest on the way to Egypt" (copy). National Museum of Art of Azerbaijan ( Baku )

• Vaganova E. O. , "Murillo and his time." M., Fig. claim. 1988.
• Levin IM , Murillo Paintings in the Hermitage. L., 1969.
• Murillo and the artists of Andalusia of the XVII century in the Hermitage collection. Catalog of the exhibition. The author of the introductory article and the compiler of the catalog L. L. Kagane. L., 1984. - 75 p.
• Somov A.I. ,. Murillo, Bartolome Esteban // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 tons (82 tons and 4 extra). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Schmidt D. A. Murillo. L., 1926.
• Lafond P. Murillo. Paris, 1930.