MURILLO, BARTOLOMÉ ESTEBAN. - Painter, b. in Seville on 31 Dec. 1617, d. there on 3 Apr. 1682. His father Gaspare Esteban was also a painter; but M., left an orphan, was raised by his aunt, Anna M., whose surname he took. A pupil of Juan de Castillo, in 1642 he went to Madrid, where he remained two years.
Having returned to Seville between 1645 and 1646, he received commissions for a series of canvases for the cloister of St. Francis, now partly in the Louvre (Miracle of St. Diego) and in private collections as well. From 1652 is his Conception in the Archbishop's Palace of Seville; in 1655 he painted for the sacristy of that Cathedral a St. Isidore and a St. Leander, and in 1656 the Apparition of Jesus to St. Anthony for the Baptistery. Subsequently he received the commission for the lunettes of St. Mary the White, today in the Prado in Madrid, and then for the Conception with Devout Worshippers, today in the Louvre. In 1672 he also executed numerous paintings for the chapel of the hospital of his city, and then, in 1678, two canvases for the Augustinians of Seville, one today in the Museum of that city, the other in the Prado in Madrid. At that time he also painted a series of paintings for the Hospital of the Priests of Seville. These were his last works: having gone in 1680 to Cadiz to work in the convent of the Capuchins, he fell from a bridge and injured himself so gravely that he could no longer work during the other two years in which he was alive.
The journey made in his youth to Madrid was certainly decisive for the formation of M.'s pictorial style which, following the study of the works of Titian, of van Dyck and of Rubens gathered in that capital, freed his original manner from the typical Sevillian dryness. Indeed, from his earliest works onward, subsequent to that experience, he painted with a rich chromatic impasto dense with chiaroscuro, whence the forms emerge modeled with an extreme sweetness that sometimes recalls Correggio and the Emilians of the late sixteenth century. Then, as he progresses over time, M., while not substantially modifying his manner, gradually lightens it and, as it were, softens it in the choice of tones, while his curiosity also drove him to insist on veristic elements of representation according to a taste that is also typically Spanish.
Works by M., besides in the churches and collections already mentioned, are in the principal Italian and foreign museums. - See plate CI.
Bibliography8 works
Emilio Lavagnino