This open access book examines the work of the 17th-century Baroque painter, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1619-1682) – a figure who barely left the city of Seville – as a way of understanding globalization, its consequences, and its limits.

Full of saints, friars, virgins, and Christs, or poor people and cheerful pícaros oblivious to social injustice, Murillo's painting has been considered representative of the Counter-Reformation and the exponent of an immobile, even introverted, society that regressed with the 'crisis of the 17th century'. Early Globalization, Spain, and Seventeenth-Century Seville introduces a global perspective by considering the Atlantic art market and developing comparisons with Protestant paintings and an analysis of Murillo's iconography alongside the social and political theory of his time. Such comparisons and analyses illuminate a different image, emphasizing the idea of a common European path towards modernity, individualism, emotional self-control and social change.

The book also examines how Murillo's contemporaries interpreted his iconography. The study of different 'layers of globalization', going back to the analysis of the Christian tradition, reveals the existence of political utopias, positive forms of valuing work and an image of the community that, opposed to the development of the speculative economy associated with globalization, would characterize the European history, with all its contradictions. The result is a new and sharper understanding of the tensions created by globalization in the field of art, in the construction of imagined communities, and in social relations in the early modern era.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Pablo de Olavide University, Spain.