The Immaculate Conception (c. 1680): Art, History and Details

The Immaculate Conception (c. 1680) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Spanish, 1617–1682).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception maintains that the Virgin Mary was conceived free from sin, therefore ready to be the pure vessel for Christ’s birth. The Immaculate Conception enjoyed intense devotion in Spain during the 1600s, although it was only accepted as official doctrine in 1854. The abstract subject required artists to develop appropriate imagery. The crescent moon, for example, comes from the New Testament vision of Saint John the Evangelist (Revelation 12:1) of “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet.”

Object facts

• Title: The Immaculate Conception
• Date: c. 1680
• Creator attribution: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Spanish, 1617–1682)
• Culture: Spain
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 246.3 x 152.7 x 8 cm (96 15/16 x 60 1/8 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 220.5 x 127.5 cm (86 13/16 x 50 3/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Spanish before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1959.189

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wixom, Nancy Coe. "The Immaculate Conception." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 47, no. 7 (September 1960): 163-165.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.