Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) was a Spanish painter whose baroque style was adulated for close to 200 years, condemned for almost 100, and, since the 1950s, has been reevaluated with hedging enthusiasm.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was born and died in Seville; he led an uneventful life of professional activity and success within the context of personal goodness and contentment. G. Kubler and M. Soria (1959) call him the "Fra Angelico of Spanish painting." The difficulty is that the primitivism of Fra Angelico's art allows the sweetness of his artistic expressions an autonomous existence beyond the pale of human experience, whereas the realism of Murillo's art causes the same gentleness to mock the psychic torment and spiritual alienation of present-day humanity.

If Murillo had conceived his saints of the Old and New Testaments as heroic, their excellence of soul would be more palatable today, but he presented them as middleclass...