Christ at the Pool of Bethesda

The pool with five porticoes

The subject comes from the fifth chapter of John. Beside a pool in Jerusalem lay a crowd of the sick, waiting for the water to be stirred; among them a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. Christ asks him whether he wants to be made well and tells him to take up his bed and walk. The setting — an architecture of arcades sheltering bodies on the ground — is what fixes the episode for a viewer, since the healing itself involves no gesture of touch.

Its place in the sequence

Mid-ministry, among the healings. It falls with the miracles that provoke the confrontations of the Passion rather than with the parables, because in John's account the healing takes place on the sabbath and the argument that follows sets the terms of the trial to come.

What the record gives

The catalogue names Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1670, and the National Gallery, London. It measures 237 by 261 centimetres, a broad canvas closer to square than upright. The style is classed as Baroque, the artist as Spanish, and the subject as a group composition and religious. The measured palette reads as yellow. Nothing in the record concerns the commission or the series the canvas may have belonged to.