Category Archives: Uncategorized

Juan de Roelas: Seville Honors the Immaculate Conception in 1615 (1616)

I uploaded this image here because it was too large to fit in the “Images” gallery but, I think, too important to leave out.

The painter and cleric Juan de Roelas, in Seville Honors the Immaculate Conception in 1615, left a rare visual record of the impressive procession that he witnessed on June 29 of that year. An inscription describes the event: “all the people of Seville came to the cathedral from where they went out singing ‘Everyone in general/in a clamorous cry, Elect Queen/declares that you are conceived/without original sin’: Franciscans, Carmelites, Benedictines, Trinitarians, Capuchins, Third Order, plus 20,000 secular clergy, Knights of Santiago, Alcántara, Calatrava, dukes, counts, marquises, clergy and students of the university.

-Rosemary Mulcahy, “Images of Power and Salvation”