Murillo, coming from poverty and rising to eminence, was a
Spanish Baroque painter of the 17th Century. His paintings were
primarily religious works for the convents and churches of his native Seville. Murillo’s most
famous paintings were of the Virgin and Child and the Immaculate Conception.
Christ’s Passion is
the subject of comparatively few of Murillo’s pictures. In the present canvas,
showing the Virgin contemplating the ascent to Calvary, he lays little emphasis
on the bodily sufferings of Christ or the weight of the Cross, as though
anxious to avoid portraying physical stress of any kind.
