Church of Santa María la Blanca

Santa María la Blanca is an active Catholic church. Behind its white-and-gold Baroque decoration, the walls of Seville’s main medieval synagogue have survived. The Jewish community prayed here from the thirteenth century until the pogrom of thirteen ninety-one. After the attack, the community lost the building, and Christians consecrated it as the Church of Santa María de las Nieves—Saint Mary of the Snows. Beneath later plaster, restorers discovered parts of the earlier walls and niches for Torah scrolls.

The present interior was created thanks to the canon Justino de Neve. A canon was a priest attached to a cathedral and receiving income from it. Neve oversaw the churches subordinate to the cathedral, lived in this quarter, and directly directed the rebuilding here.

The occasion arose in sixteen sixty-one. Pope Alexander VII supported veneration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary—a belief especially dear to the people of Seville. Neve decided to dedicate the renovated church to it and commissioned four paintings from Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Murillo, then Seville’s most famous painter, lived on church and private commissions; decorating Santa María la Blanca became one of the largest projects of his career.

Two paintings more than five meters long were meant to hang opposite each other beneath the dome and explain the church’s name. Murillo painted the medieval legend of John, the Roman patrician, and his wife. The couple planned to leave their fortune to the Virgin Mary but did not know how to use the money. According to the legend, Mary appeared to them in a dream and told them to build a church where snow would fall in summer. The patrician told Pope Liberius about the dream; Pope Liberius was to approve the construction. On August fifth, they came to Rome’s Esquiline Hill and saw snow outlining the plan of the future Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Hence “White Mary”: the official name refers to snow, and in the seventeenth century the whiteness of snow was also linked to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Neve found a personal coincidence in this—his surname means “snow” in Italian.

In sixteen sixty-five, the church opened after its rebuilding. Temporary arches and altars were set up in front of it, and there were processions, a poetry competition, and an exhibition of paintings. Murillo gave Neve his portrait in gratitude for the commission; later, the painter named the canon executor of his will.

One hundred forty-five years later, the French marshal Nicolas Soult, one of the leaders of the occupation of Seville and a collector of Murillo’s works, ordered the four paintings commissioned by Neve to be removed. The two large paintings about the dream and the meeting with the pope were sent to the Napoleon Museum in Paris. After Napoleon’s defeat, they were returned to Spain in eighteen sixteen, but they never reached Seville: since nineteen oh one, both have been in the Prado Museum.

On the entrance arch, the words of a papal document are still repeated: Mary was free from original sin from the first moment of her existence. Beneath the dome hang copies from the nineteen seventies—exactly in the places from which Soult ordered Murillo’s originals removed.