Chapter 1 of 6
A Vision in Gold
You're standing before the largest and last of the Immaculate Conceptions Murillo painted in Seville, made around 1678 for the city's Hospital de los Venerables, a home for aged priests. The Virgin rises out of nothing, borne up on cloud and cherub, clothed in white and blue against a wall of gold. There is no ground, no horizon, only ascent.
Murillo dissolves every edge into a soft, smoky light the Spanish called vaporoso. Marshal Soult later carried the canvas off to Paris; it hung in the Louvre for a century before returning to Madrid.
