“Like a flash of light”. In such an unorthodox and, even less, academic way, I answer if they ask me about the return of The Triumph of the Sacrament of the Eucharist by Francisco de Herrera el Mozo to the Cathedral of Seville.

The work, which has been part of the extraordinary exhibition dedicated to the artist by the Prado Museum and curated by the Complutense Art History Professor, Benito Navarrete, can be seen for the next two months in the back-choir of the cathedral.

After this time, it will return to the place for which it was conceived, the entrance to the meeting room of the Sacramental Brotherhood of the Tabernacle. Herrera’s canvas breaks the large crimson drapery on which it is placed with the cannon of light that emanates from the scene represented.

It was the first work that he carried out in his native Seville and with it he must have animated the show in the artistic environment of Seville in the mid-seventeenth century.. In fact, it not only caused a stir, but also influenced such outstanding figures on the artistic scene as Murillo and Valdés Leal, forming a trident that was the gateway to the full baroque in the Seville capital.

A Seville that, after the turning point caused by the bubonic plague epidemic of 1649, had gone from being a large, wealthy, cosmopolitan commercial city to a city that had lost almost half its population and had mutated into a provincial and full of religious institutions that articulated a society dedicated to pious practices.

As for the artistic circles, a generational replacement was needed which, on the other hand, was already taking shape and which would bear the names of these three gentlemen who are the protagonists of what I am telling you about today.. But, of the three, Francisco de Herrera el Mozo is the least claimed.

Sometimes, the memory of those who are in charge of recording facts and names of the past is capricious and selective, leaving in the drawer of oblivion those who deserve an open window in the story of History.

Herrera deserves hers. a window and seven. At that time, Murillo was a 10-year-old boy, Valdés Leal barely raised a foot from the ground at five years old and Velázquez had left for Madrid four years ago..

Our Herrera began his artistic training, inevitably, in the workshop of his father, Herrera el Viejo. And Herrera father was difficult to bear. So much so that, according to Palomino in his biographies of artists, Herrera el Mozo and a sister fled the parental home, taking some savings with them to get by.

He married twenty years behind his father’s back and in a few months he had already divorced. After the follies of youth, he finished his training in Italy and that stay was definitive in forging an artistic personality that would ultimately prove essential to definitively establish the full Baroque in Spain. And how did that arrogant and proud young man do it? With two works that make it the link between the two great cultural centers of the country: Seville and Madrid.

Recently arrived in Madrid from Italy (Rome, Florence, Venice, Bernini, Veronese, Pietro da Cortona, etc.) in 1654 he painted the spectacular The Triumph of Saint Hermenegildo for the former convent of the Discalced Carmelites, of which he himself came to say that “he was going to play bugles and kettledrums” because vanity went hand in hand with mastery. That work marked those who saw it, devotees, public and colleagues, becoming one of the milestones of Spanish painting of the 17th century.

In that same year of 1654, his father died and Herrera Jr. had to return to Seville to fix the paperwork for these tragic cases.. And what was going to be an express trip, becomes a five-year stay of which we still have the extraordinary work that, since last week, has been hanging at the foot of the cathedral and which was the second blow to the table of Herrera to definitively establish a new baroque language and the Ecstasy of San Francisco (1656-57), also in the Seville cathedral.

As in Madrid, The Triumph of the Sacrament of the Eucharist (1655) caused the same commotion in Seville and inevitably influenced the teachers of the Sevillian school of the time. Murillo and Valdés Leal were permeable to Herrera’s persuasion and something changed in Sevillian painting from that moment on.

It is, to say the least, exciting to be able to contemplate the work of the three masters in just 50 or 60 meters inside the hollow mountain. On the other side, on the north wall, the thread leads us to the chapel of San Antonio, where Murillo, already artistically upset by Herrera, shows his monumental San Antonio de Padua and the Child Jesus (1656) with an enveloping atmosphere, diffuse limits, and lighting and stage effects that undoubtedly lead to Herrera. Three teachers who met, admired and were influenced, for luck and fortune, by those of us who live in the eternal search for light.