Sevilla Free Tours - Charity Church and Charity Hospital; Territory of Murillo

Charity Church and Charity Hospital; Territory of Murillo

13/01/2019

Nobody knows for sure the story of a licentious and arrogant aristocrat who, after the death of his wife, regretted his excesses and devoted himself completely to caring for the sick poor in the Brotherhood of Holy Charity in Seville. It has arrived until our days.

Miguel de Mañara was a real character, he led a dissipated life in his youth but he was also the promoter of the entire program of the church of Santa Caridad, where he lived until the last years of life, donating even a large part of his assets to contribute On it.

The Sevillian nobleman of Corsican origin requested his entry into the Brotherhood of Holy Charity of Seville in 1662, but he should not have had a very good reputation in the city when the brothers, all aristocrats, took three months to accept his request.

Along with the belongings left by Mañara, who left his palace in Calle Levíes and lived in a hospital cell since 1677, the famous canvas by Pedro de Camprobín can be seen Death visiting the knight or Christ healing the paralytic in the probatic pool of Jerusalem , a seventeenth-century flamenco canvas belonging to the Order. Now we can know that Murillo saw this painting and was inspired by it to make the series of Charity.

On the other hand Murillo entered the Brotherhood of Santa Caridad in 1665 admitted by its founder, the Venerable Miguel Mañara, and were neighbors in the old Jewish quarter, with which he maintained a close and sincere friendship. In the year 1650 Mañara sponsors the daughter of the painter Isabel Francisca, and the following year her son Francisco Miguel.

Mañara, and with him Murillo, was convinced of the mysterious identification of Jesus with the poor and the sick. Therefore, he urges his brothers of Holy Charity the need to assist the sick not from a distance, but from the closeness and immediacy of the body, washing, healing and kissing their wounds.

From his conviction that Jesus mysteriously identifies himself with the poor, Murillo gladly accepts the exacting moral codes that Mañara imposed on his brothers as founder of Santa Caridad and states that Murillo scrupulously fulfilled this obligation.

In the documentation to justify his entry into Charity in 1665, he specifies that he does so because he will be very much at the service of God Nr. Mr. and of the poor, both for his relief and for his art for the adornment of our chapel. Murillo was very aware of the evangelizing force of his painting. It is enough to trace their existential budgets and their most intimate convictions. It is more than probable that Mañara and Murillo conceived jointly the iconographic program of the works of mercy, which Murillo will later take to the canvases.

The Hospital de la Caridad, we find it in the Temprado street, if you visit Seville, you will even see today some works of Murillo inside, also finding one of the most representative baroque altars in Europe, by Juan Valdes Leal.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary taking care of the dwellers.

Towards 1672.

Oil on canvas. 325 x 245 cm.

Seville, church of the Hospital of Santa Caridad.