Miguel Mañara

Miguel Mañara Vicentelo de Leca y Colona was born in Seville on 3 March 1627 into a wealthy family of Corsican origin that had settled in Andalusia and grown rich through trade with the Spanish Americas. His father, Tomás Mañara Leca y Colona, was a prominent merchant. Raised among the Sevillian nobility of the seventeenth century, Miguel received an education befitting his rank and in early adulthood shared the luxurious social life of the city’s aristocracy. In 1648 he married Jerónima Carrillo de Mendoza. She died in 1661; the marriage left no children. Biographers treat her death as the turning point that led Mañara to a searching examination of conscience and a conversion from worldly display to penance and charity.

After this conversion he entered the Hermandad de la Santa Caridad (Brotherhood of Holy Charity) of Seville in 1662. The brotherhood was a lay confraternity, founded in the sixteenth century, whose original works were the burial of the abandoned dead and aid to the destitute. Mañara was elected Hermano Mayor (elder brother) in 1663 and thoroughly reformed the institution, committing his fortune to its expansion. Under his direction the brotherhood built the Hospital de la Caridad to shelter the homeless, nurse the sick, and give the poorest of Seville a dignified death. He also oversaw construction and decoration of the adjoining church of San Jorge.

The church became a monument of Counter-Reformation spirituality in Seville. Mañara commissioned vanitas paintings by Juan de Valdés Leal, notably In Ictu Oculi and Finis Gloriae Mundi, and canvases of the works of mercy by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. He himself wrote a spiritual treatise, the Discurso de la Verdad (Discourse on Truth), meditating on death, the emptiness of worldly honor, and the duty of charity. The book was intended for the brothers of the Santa Caridad and reflects the austere piety of seventeenth-century Seville after his conversion.

Mañara died in Seville on 9 May 1679 and was buried in the church of the Hospital de la Caridad beneath an epitaph he had composed, describing himself in extreme humility as the worst of men. The hospital and brotherhood continued after his death and remain active. A later romantic legend identified him with Don Juan; serious historians reject the identification, because the literary Don Juan already appears in Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla in the early seventeenth century, before Mañara’s adulthood, and because his documented life after 1661 is one of organized charity rather than libertinism. A cause for beatification has been promoted in the Archdiocese of Seville, but he has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church.