Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville

Museo de Bellas Artes is a major Seville gallery devoted to Spanish visual art, with works ranging from the medieval period into the early twentieth century. Its main entrance opens onto Plaza del Museo, and inside you find fourteen galleries, three cloisters, and a patio. The collection grew largely from convents and monasteries dissolved during secularization, so religious painting—especially from Sevillian Baroque—is its defining strength.

Look for the names of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Valdés Leal, the leading figures associated with Seville’s seventeenth-century painting. Among the collection’s highlights are Murillo’s Madonna and Child of the Napkin and Zurbarán’s Saint Hugh in the Carthusian Refectory. The building began in 1594 as a convent for the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, an order founded by Saint Peter Nolasco during Ferdinand III’s reign.

Juan de Oviedo y de la Bandera directed substantial work on it in the early seventeenth century. The provincial museum was created on September 16, 1835, and the museum took shape here as works were transferred in the years that followed. What you see, then, is both a former convent and a concentrated journey through Spanish religious painting.