The Good Shepherd
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Murillo did not illustrate the parable; he recast it. The shepherd had been a grown man, whom the first Christian painters built out of Hermes Kriophoros and Orpheus. Murillo made him a barefoot child in a rose tunic, the lamb gathered under his left arm in the way you gather something lost and found. Sevillian painters after him kept the shepherd a child.
He sits before a broken column and fragments of entablature, ruins the Prado reads as paganism conquered. Ceán Bermúdez noted the likeness of the Child's pose to the frontispiece of Stefano della Bella's mythological engravings, 1644.
Sources: Museo Nacional del Prado, 'El Buen Pastor', P000962. · Nerea V. Pérez López, 'La iconografía del buen pastor niño...', Laboratorio de Arte 29 (2017), pp. 311-328 · Nerea V. Pérez López, 'La iconografía del Buen Pastor niño y su vinculación con la pintura sevillana', Laboratorio de Arte 29 (2017).
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.
John 10:11 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 2,901 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.