Murillo's allegories of salvation and triumph

This important work explores the allegorical meanings of two exquisite narrative series of paintings created by Spain's finest painter of the late baroque period, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, in a decade of spiraling political and economic decline, 1660-1670. The six colorful paintings that make up The Parable of the Prodigal Son represent Christ's famous parable recorded in the Gospel of Luke. The Life of Jacob, five splendid canvases that are believed to have been commissioned by Seville's Marquis of Villamanrique, follows the life of the Old Testament patriarch found in Genesis. The allegories of salvation and triumph that structure Murillo's pictorial narratives are substantiated through contemporary Spanish theology, drama, and moral philosophy, as well as in popular emblem-book literature. The lives of the prodigal and the patriarch were interpreted symbolically as early as the fourth century by Christian theologians whose exegeses were fundamental to Spain's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century apologists. The Scriptures were also invoked by Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age whose texts form an especially fruitful source for the interpretation of Murillo's painted narratives, which, like the plays, follow a scene-by-scene format. The tale of a privileged youth (the prodigal) who suffers extreme deprivation for displeasing his parent, but is absolved through repentance, conforms to the mood of self-recrimination that swept the Spanish peninsula in the latter half of the seventeenth century and was commonly seen in Spanish art. The metaphorical triumph expressed in The Life of Jacob is directly linked to the progressive decline of the Spanish empire under its Hapsburg monarchy. The popularity of pictorial triumphs with Spanish patrons increased in proportion to the monarchy's decline, and it expired, along with Spain's shattered dreams, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Murillo's Allegories of Salvation and Triumph, the first book-length analysis of Spanish narrative series of paintings, makes an important contribution to our knowledge of Spanish baroque painting and fills a void in Murillo studies.