In portraiture, Murillo was ordinary; his palette was all earths, and his brush could be sluggish through them. But when he painted heaven his brush danced in gold, pink and blue. Looking closely at the Dulwich Madonna of the Rosary, made in Murillo’s mature vaporoso style, I think this is how I would like to be able to paint. Every movement is joyously open-ended, yet deliberate and perfectly accurate. But if you find merit only in worldly substance, this heavenly vapour is all vapidity. Murillo often painted the Immaculate Conception. It was his triumph to bring such visceral sweetness to so abstract a subject. But if you come assuming that the subject is froth, of course you will judge Murillo’s treatment of it just a sugar-coating.
Murillo’s sweetness was sympathy. He seems a fair and gentle soul. It is touching how he envisaged the Virgin, floating among angels, as a robust Spanish peasant- girl; and so he thought to drape her shoulders — over the splendid ultramarine cloak — with a drab brown shawl.
At the same time the National Gallery’s Barocci exhibition has delighted critics. Barocci was more cerebral, less brilliant than Murillo; but with all his soft, wetted, bulging eyes, he too was a sweet painter. His scenes are animated by gusts from heaven, in which lustrous-hued draperies flutter. Perhaps taste is changing, and we are again ready to see beyond common things to “higher” art.
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