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Athey find the impossibly black ground, the hanged man looks pale and glistening. There is no color, beyond the flow of blood at Christ’s feet from the nails driven through his body. His head is drooping, and his perfectly modeled face is at peace (no pain here). But the most interesting thing about the picture is the folded fabric, which folds and folds and rotates in its center – you can imagine that you are passing your hand through it, and feel the amount of linen and its texture. In its original home, the monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville, the painting was shown with “little light”, according to the 17th century Spanish artist and writer, Antonio Palomino. “Everyone who sees it, but doesn’t know it, believes it’s a sculpture.” The paleness of the body, the cloth, must have come out of the darkness like a vision.
Francisco de Zurbarán, who painted this Crucified Christ alone, is one of three great Spanish 17th century artists. But, unlike his colleagues Velázquez and Murillo, he has not shown himself in the UK – until now, as his work forms the basis of a major exhibition that will open at the National Gallery in London. Compared to his contemporary and friend Velázquez (born in 1599, one year after Zurbarán), his work may seem quiet. You can clearly see the difference, in the memory functions Spanish military victory that each of them was commissioned to paint Philip IV of Spain’s new palace, the Palacio del Buen Retiro. Both are now in the Prado. In Zurbarán Defense of Cádiz Against the English has the character of a frieze, while Spanish generals look down calmly on the naval battle below. Paintings by Velázquez The offering of Breda and all the drama, meet: a quick sketch that takes time to escape.
Zurbarán’s art is different. He is an artist of inner vision, meditation and imagination. Time doesn’t run away, but it stops. He has a strange quality, which makes you wonder what you are looking for, partly because he can make invisible things strong and effective, partly because sometimes his works show two real planes at the same time.
Take one of the first in the National Gallery’s exhibition: The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, the latter saint to be the founder of the Mercedarian order of friars, whose mission was to rescue fellow Christians captured by Muslims in the Mediterranean conflicts. (This work was one of twelve sent in 1629, at the beginning of Zurbarán’s career, to the monastery of Merced Calzada, Seville, which is now seen as the city. Museum of Fine Arts.)
St Peter Nolasco is on the right, dressed in white, and “sees” St Peter – hanging upside down – wandering on an ocher cloud. But St Peter Nolasco does not seem to be in a real place. We are not “with” him, wherever that may be (the background image is obvious). The painting seems to offer itself as a double critique of the absurd, as if it were a vision.
There were good theological reasons for painting like this at that time: after the Council of Trent, whose discussions defined the Counter-Reformation, religious art was sung with a direct, clear purpose: to move the believer to devotion. With the exception of a year spent in Madrid painting the court in the mid-1630s, his work was concentrated in Seville, and his clients were mainly the most powerful religious base of the city and the region as a whole.
At that time, Seville was very rich. From 1503, it had the right to trade with the Spanish rulers in America – a position that Zurbarán took advantage of, sending more than 100 cloths to be sent to Lima, Buenos Aires and elsewhere. Zurbarán also presented Philip’s Buen Retiro home exhibition – alongside his naval battles in Cádiz, 10 portraits of Hercules progressing through his career, and the curious head of a man who is shocked when he looks inside the rooms of the National Gallery. But it is in the divine and spiritual arts that he excelled.
Sometimes these commissions were quite extraordinary, and must have required a busy studio – as in the 24 paintings of Merced Calzada in Seville, or the 15 x 10m altar of the Carthusian monastery. Our Lady of Protectionoutside of Jerez de la Frontera. The last monks moved out recently, and now it is possible to visit the honey stone building, where its baroque appearance is in front of the 15th century Renaissance building. But there in the church you have to imagine all the power of the altar of Zurbarán, and its twelve paintings that are among the decorated sculptures from, after the Napoleonic wars and the end of the monasteries in Spain in 1835 these – like many other works in Spanish churches – were sold and dispersed.
Scholars argue about what the altar was like in the first place. The reconstruction of the National Gallery has placed the Virgin of Zurbarán in the highest position, led by the Passion of the Magi and the Circumcision. If the building is suitable to support this reconstruction, it will be the first time that the projects have been put together since they were abolished.
From the grand scale to the intimate and gentle: some of Zurbarán’s most effective works are not busy, entertaining saints and biblical stories but his fascinating miniatures are still alive. He was a wonderful painter of texture and weight. In the works in Seville’s Museum of Fine Arts – not in the London exhibition – the most interesting part of the events of The Pilgrimage of St Hugh for the founders of the Carthusians is, for me, not the miracle of the meat turning to ashes, or even the sad faces of the monks, but the sustenance of the loaves of bread, and the smoothness of the blue and white ceramic carafes which, at the bottom, become cruel and dull.
Zurbarán’s son Juan – who died in the terrible epidemic of plague that robbed Seville of its prosperity and half its population in 1649 – still created a life that gives a different impression to that of his father. It is brighter, overflowing with flowers, marigolds, jasmine, pears and lemons than its father, where everything is in its place, stable. As in his paintings of divine visions, small rows of bowls and vases produced late in his career, around 1650, appear on the tomb.
The original work, from 1633, has a plate of citrons glazed in their silver plate; a basket of oranges filled with a branch of leaves and flowers (correctly, since oranges produce flowers and fruit at the same time) and a cup of water in a silver bowl with a flower lying on its rim. Fruits and flowers can be considered as symbols of divinity. But as with Zurbarán’s paintings of visions, these works seem to invite you to pretend that you are seeing tangible things, things you want to run your fingers through – and other worldly things, things that make you think of the spiritual.
The ambiguity of what we are being invited to see is the strongest and most compelling aspect of the final work on the show. It’s small, and you can pass it on your way out, thinking it’s another hanging with a praying man in front. But look again: it seems that the man standing before Christ – against the rest of Zurbarán’s black background – is an artist. In his left hand are brushes, and a palette full of paint that is just right to create the character’s body shape and robes. The artist’s right hand is on his heart, his red face looks up in horror at his savior – who, by contrast, is gray-skinned and quite dead.
Who is this statue and its images standing under the cross? He is sometimes known as St Luke, the patron saint of artists. But it is impossible not to think of him, in a way, and Zurbarán himself. It’s impossible not to think of a work of art when looking at this work. Drawing such as devotion, wonder and prayer. Photography as a way of seeing the divine. Photography as a way of presenting a vision that moves between the real and the real, the illusion and the tangible.
