Ecce Agnus Dei

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo · c. 1655

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

270.2 × 184.5 cm (106 3/8 × 72 5/8 in.); Framed: 317 × 232 cm (124 13/16 × 91 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Ecce Agnus Dei captures Murillo at his most tender — the young St. John the Baptist cradling a lamb with a quietness that feels more like a private moment than a religious statement. Murillo spent nearly his entire life in Seville, where he became the city's most beloved painter of devotional subjects. Working in the mid-seventeenth century, he developed a style that softened the drama of Spanish Baroque into something warmer and more intimate — figures bathed in diffused golden light, edges gently blurred, expressions caught between innocence and knowing. In this work, the interplay between the boy's downcast gaze and the stillness of the lamb gives the scene an emotional weight that no amount of symbolism alone could manufacture. Murillo returned to the subject of the young Baptist and the Agnus Dei several times throughout his career, treating it less as theology and more as a meditation on tenderness itself — a theme that made his religious paintings unusually accessible to ordinary worshippers. This hand-painted oil reproduction is worked on canvas using traditional pigments and layered glazing, preserving the soft luminosity and warm tonal range that make the original so quietly affecting.