A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. Laura Cumming

raise the question of their own existence but also of our common mortality. Michelangelo appears as the skin of a corpse, alluding to his disappearance from this world (a self-portrait that might alert one to the pathos and humility of his work instead of the usual narrative of power). Goya painted the doctor who saved him from death raising a cup to his lips, supporting his body as in a pietà. The artist’s gratitude is repeated in words beneath; without Dr Arrieta, extinction. Murillo also explained the purpose of his self-portrait with an inscription that is unusually prominent, scrolling out of the bottom of the picture like a document from a fax and transmitting its message just as effectively: ‘Bartolomé Murillo portraying himself to fulfil the wishes and prayers of his children.’

      Murillo was the leading Sevillian artist of the seventeenth century, more successful even than Velázquez; after his death, the government had to enforce an export ban simply to stop the last remaining Murillos flooding out of the country. Although he was Spain’s foremost religious painter, he was even more celebrated abroad for his images of street urchins. Children were his subject and his passion; orphaned at the age of eleven and brought up by one of his sisters, he had twelve children of his own. When his wife died, he remained a widower, raising the entire family by himself. Cholera and typhus orphaned many of the models depicted in his pictures and he lost several children during the worst of the epidemics. The words beneath his self-portrait are not empty but a tender expression of paternal love for his surviving offspring, tinged with deep knowledge of mortality.

      Murillo is specially dressed to appear after his death in a fine lace collar and black silk tunic (he was, by all accounts, generally more threadbare). Although the highest paid artist in Seville, he gave most of his money to charity and regularly worked for the church without pay; the strain of labour registers in his face. He appears in an oval frame propped on a shelf; perhaps it is a mirror – there is that silvery play of light across the face – or perhaps it is a painting. Either way, it is modelled on contemporary frontispieces representing pictures within paintings.

      Self-Portrait, c. 1670–73 Bartolome Esteban Murillo (c. 1617–82)

      But the illusion is broken, literally and metaphorically, by the artist’s own hand which reaches out to rest casually upon the frame, signalling subtly towards the palette and brushes on the right, balanced on the left by a drawing – what else? – of a child. Between the tools he used to make art, and the art that supported Murillo’s family, are the words he wrote for his children; the chain of creation is complete. The inscription is poignant but so is the gesture, for in that breach of illusion where Murillo’s hand moves between the two pictures there is a brief sense of freedom, a quickening, as if he were still living.