Los santos se han de pintar de manera que no quiten la gana de rezar en ellos, antes pongan devocion pues el principal efecto y fin de su pintura ha de ser esta.
Back to my flying visit to London the other week, and after I had photographed the Comyn Ching Triangle I headed off to The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the current exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664).
This was my first in depth encounter with his work, and for that matter, with the exception of Picasso, any Spanish Art of any period. I think I may only have encountered Zurbarán's work in reproduction to be honest. I can only therefore describe this exhibition as a revelation. An intense, at times profound, experience, with the visitor immediately plunged into devotional world of the Spanish Counter Reformation. The world of the Spanish Mystics, of St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and St Ignatius Loyola. What you might think of as the unseen engine of this exhibition.
Confronting the visitor is a monumental depiction of the Crucifixion - the earliest signed work by Zurbarán - Christ is near to death, the darkness has come upon all the earth, blotting out everything. He is naked save for his brilliant white loin cloth, and his is alone. Alone as forlorn, alone as the sole focus of devotion. It is said that his contemporaries thought they were viewing a sculpture, not a painting.
And then, to the right, there is the breath-taking 'Martyrdom of St Serapion' of 1628. The saint, who came from the Great Britain and was martyred for his ransoming of Christian slaves in North Africa and is depicted, dressed in the habit of the Mercedarian friars, hanging by his wrists, head on one side, heavy with either exhaustion or death. In reality he was crucified and his body hacked to pieces. To be honest I don't think I've ever seen a painting quiet like it, the composition is so unusual. Both paintings point to Zurbarán's supreme mastery of fabric. In the martyrdom it is almost all fabric.
Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, in Extramadura, at the mid-point of the Golden Age - the Siglo de Oro - a roughly two hundred year period marked at one end by the completion of the Reconquista, and Columbus's first voyage to the New World, and at the other the Terminus ad Quem of the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, and (according to some historians) the Terminus post Quem of the death of the dramatist Pedro Colderon de la Barca in 1681. A period not only of Spanish military and political dominance in Europe and beyond, but a remarkable expansion in the arts and architecture. Zurbarán's working life was spent mainly in the city of Seville, a place that was both provincial (a long way from the artistic centres of the Italian Peninsular and the Low Countries) and the hub of trans-Atlantic trade between Spain and her empire. There was, therefore, a lot of money to be spent on art.
To put him into an artistic, and European, context, Zurbarán was born, lived, and died during the nascence of the Baroque, when the city of Rome underwent an extraordinary century long transformation. Bernini was his exact contemporary. In Spain, El Greco had died when Zurbarán was sixteen, and Velasquez, Murillo were near contemporaries. And yet, except for the possible influence of Caravaggio,* Zurbarán seems hardly touched by any of this. He eschews the writhing ecstasy, the effulgence of sensation. And, as pointed out by Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writing in The Spectator (25.4.26), he eschews blood. Zurbarán's art, in contrast, is sober, possessing an austere spiritual intensity that seems to look back not only to the High Renaissance, but the Late Medieval Art of the Low Countries.** His figures have heft.
All of this is not so far from 'estilo disornamentado' - aka the Arquitectura Herreriana - the architectural style developed by Juan de Herrera during the construction of El Escorial, the vast palace complex commission by Philip II outside Madrid. Like the painter, the architect before him rejected the excesses of Mannerism, retaining a preference for the High Renaissance, and like the painting the architecture has a lingering sense of the Gothic. What was produced by these men was a sort of distilled creation, shorn of the extraneous. Zurbarán's use of tenebrism is, perhaps, part of that process of elimination.
To return now to the paintings. The second room (there are seven in all) contains the single picture in the exhibition I actively disliked. (There always had to be one.) 'The Virgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians', 1648-9. It hangs between two other paintings, 'The Circumcision' and 'The Adoration of the Magi', which together formed a single tier from what must have been a colossal altarpiece, commissioned by the Carthusians of Jerez de la Frontera. 'The Adoration' I particularly liked. A fine composition, rather Netherlandish.
The third room contains of what you might term religious portraits - virgin martyrs in beautifully rendered contemporaneous costume and two depictions of St Francis of Assisi. One, of St Francis standing, is often used to exemplify Zurbaran's work. Justifiably so.
Movingly, in the fourth room, a group of three immense crucifixions, and on the wall opposite two Assumptions of the Virgin Mary. In the fifth, some rare secular work, particularly three (?) paintings from a series of seven of the Labours of Hercules. Opposite two of larger series of the sons of Jacob, on loan from the Bishop's Palace at Bishop Auckland in County Durham, where they grace the Prince Bishop's State Dining Room. I think they were the first of Zurbaban's paintings to arrive in Britain. They are quite different in tone from the Labours of Hercules, and from a lot of work in the exhibition, what with their exuberant costumes and colouring. And then there is the Giant Head - an enormous painting of a man's head that has relatively recently been accredited to Zurbarán, placed as to visible from the other end of the enfilade in room 3 It's rather compelling. If not strange.
In contrast, the exhibition concludes with two rooms given over to small works; still-lives & devotional works. As the popular reworking of a saying of St Theresa of Avila has it: 'Dios anda entre los pucheros.'*** These still-lives illustrate, for me, a recuring element in Zurbarán's work, a sense of distance, if not unreality, which occurs also sometimes, say, in the work of David Hockney. A sort of disengagement, that seems particularly strong in the pictures of fruit (invariably lemons) in baskets. Though obviously painted from life there is an air of detachment about them that could be due to the strange use of light and colour. A juxtaposition of hyperreality of the lemons and the almost schematic treatment of the basket. In general there is a recurrent strangeness, an awkwardness if you will, about Zurbarán's work that sets it apart, and sometimes disturbs the viewer.
We are also introduced to the work of his son Juan de Zurbarán, particularly his mesmerizing still-life 'Plate of Grapes', of 1639, painted when he was a mere 19 years old. Masterly.
* Zurbarán has been called the 'Spanish Caravaggio' from his masterly use of chiaroscuro. However, it seems unlikely that he had any contact with the art of Caravaggio. It has been suggested that
** King Philip II was avid collector not only of Venetian Art, the art of the Low Countries.
*** 'God moves between the pots and pans.'
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