Nicola Jennings: At the National Gallery

Nicola Jennings

As one of the day’s first visitors to the National Gallery, I arrived at the Zurbarán exhibition just before the lights went on. Suddenly, as if in an ecstatic vision, a huge image of Christ on the Cross against a black backdrop appeared in front of me. Projecting into the gallery space, with soft and supple skin, Christ seemed almost alive. Zurbarán made the painting for a monastery in Seville. Visiting the city a hundred years later, the painter Antonio Palomino described seeing it behind the grille of the dimly lit oratory. ‘All those who see it,’ he said, ‘take it to be a sculpture.’

Francisco de Zurbarán was one of the leading artists in Seville. The National Gallery’s monographic exhibition (until 23 August) is the first of its kind in the UK. It is a bold move. Almost all the works are products of the Counter-Reformation. It is also inspired. Zurbarán has always seemed to me an engaging but second division painter. Seeing many of his paintings across all the genres together, I realised I was wrong. They are mesmerising.

‘St Ambrose’ (c.1626-27).

Zurbarán was born in 1598, in the remote town of Fuente de Cantos. His talent was spotted early. In 1614, his merchant father sent him to Seville to apprentice with the little-known painter Pedro Díaz de Villanueva. The young Zurbarán then set up his own workshop in Llerena (about 30 km from his hometown). Everything we know about this period derives from documented commissions rather than surviving works. One such commission came in 1624 from the Mercedarians in Azuaga, near Badajoz, to carve and polychrome a wood crucifix. In 1625, his first wife having died, Zurbarán married the rich Beatríz de Morales. This enabled him to try his luck in Seville, where there were greater opportunities.

Seville was a huge imperial city and commercial hub, the headquarters of Spanish commerce with the New World and the principal gateway to Northern and Southern Europe. Merchants from Antwerp, Genoa and other important centres rubbed shoulders with colonial administrators, beggars and slaves (mostly from sub-Saharan Africa). Ignacio Cano’s catalogue essay sets the scene. Seville was also Spain’s most devout city and the headquarters of the Inquisition. Only Rome is said to have had more churches, convents and monasteries. The art market was oriented towards them and the confraternities. After the Council of Trent, religious institutions needed artworks that inspired devotion and clearly depicted official dogma. As time went on, the American market became another important source of income.

Zurbarán’s first Seville commission, in 1626, was to produce a series of paintings, mostly of the life and afterlife of St Dominic, for the Dominican monastery of San Pablo. Zurbarán’s strategy of undercutting the city’s more established artists no doubt helped him secure the job. All that remains of the monastery is its church. The Crucifixion (now kept in Chicago) is one of only six of the paintings to survive.

Zurbarán’s distinctive approach is already apparent, a harmonious, chiaroscuro synthesis of the mystical and the natural. The San Pablo Crucifixion was not a novel composition. Francisco Pacheco – Diego Velázquez’s father-in-law and teacher, the Inquisition’s ‘censor and inspector of all sacred subjects’ and author of an influential treatise on art – had painted a similar Crucifixion in 1614, also on a black background. Zurbarán followed the censor’s example: in both paintings, Christ’s body stands on a suppedaneum, crucified with four nails (one for each foot) rather than three. A sign nailed to the top of the cross reads, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin: ‘This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’ But where Pacheco’s Christ is flat and hieratic, a 17th-century Pantocrator, Zurbarán’s is mortal. His torso leans to one side to suggest the weight of his flesh. A crumpled cartellino at the base of the cross says: ‘Franco Dezur/Fa 1627.’ A small but impressive exercise in trompe l’oeil, it was the first of many in Zurbarán’s work.

Both Pacheco and Zurbarán were no doubt looking at Seville’s rich corpus of Crucifixions in polychromed wood. The dramatic transformation of these figures when illuminated by candlelight had been captured in the mid-16th century by Pieter de Kempeneer, born in Brussels in 1503. Known in Seville as Pedro de Campaña, he anticipated Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro by several decades. The appearance of the loincloth in Zurbarán’s painting suggests he also employed tela encolada – the stiffened cloth used by sculptors to recreate three-dimensional garments – in the modelling process. He was demonstrating not only that painting could match polychromed sculpture’s verdad (truth), but that it could – to quote Xavier Bray – ‘play with the different levels of reality in a way that sculpture cannot aspire to emulate’. Zurbarán’s sculptural approach would influence Velázquez’s treatment of the subject a few years later.

The paintings in San Pablo were an immediate success, capturing in a new and powerful manner Trent’s reformist directives. In 1628, Zurbarán signed a contract with the friars of Nuestra Señora de la Merced for 22 paintings of the life of their founder, St Peter Nolasco. The monastery, today the Museo de Bellas Artes, was built in the 13th century, soon after Seville’s Reconquista, under Nolasco’s guidance. (Like many monasteries throughout Spain, it was looted by Napoleon’s troops, then confiscated by the Spanish state in the 1830s.) The Mercedarians’ mission was to ransom Christians captured and enslaved by Muslims around the Mediterranean.

Hanging in London next to the Crucifixion is St Serapion, which hung in the monastery’s mortuary chapel. Born in England or Scotland in 1179, Serapion made two journeys to ransom prisoners, in Murcia and Algiers, though it was probably English pirates that captured, dismembered and disembowelled him. In a three-quarter view that fills the large canvas, the martyred Serapion hangs from his wrists in a Christ-like pose. Zurbarán does not show us the saint’s wounds but makes us imagine them, creating a deep shadow down the side of Serapion’s voluminous habit and gesturing towards it with a red stole.

‘St Serapion’ (1628). © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Zurbarán clearly had a sizeable workshop by the time he signed the deal with the friars, committing in his contract to move to Seville with as many of his oficiales, or assistants, as were necessary to complete the work quickly. Nolasco had been canonised a few months earlier. He never made the pilgrimage to the shrine of his name saint in Rome; as a ‘consolation’, he received two celestial visions: one of heaven, the other of the martyred St Peter. The third painting in the exhibition’s opening space is Zurbarán’s depiction of the latter.

It’s another extraordinary work, exemplifying the translation of visionary experience into paint for which Zurbarán became famous. Nolasco kneels before St Peter who has appeared to him upside down on the cross. The model – as in many paintings by Zurbarán – is a Flemish engraving, which shows St Peter in a cloud in a columned interior. Zurbarán simplifies the scheme, setting the visionary moment in a black, indeterminate space. The crucified saint’s eyes pop. Amber divine light makes his white cloak glow, shadows emphasising the weight of the serried folds.

The Surrender of Seville (1629), in the following room, is also from the Mercedarian commission. It is one of several Sevillian paintings of Fernando III receiving the keys to the city from Achacaf, the conquered Almohad emir. St Peter Nolasco, his friars and Fernando’s commanders look on, with the Castilian army and city of Seville behind them. Zurbarán was a fine portraitist: the friars appear to have been painted from life. As the art historian Benito Navarrete Prieto underlines in the catalogue, Zurbarán had an ‘unparalleled mastery of fabric and drapery’. The saint wears a gold and silver embroidered doublet and paned hose, fashionable in the 17th century, further embellished with fantastical armour. His fine calfskin boots are stretched tight by suspenders. A magnificent gorra spouts white ostrich feathers, sourced at considerable expense from Africa or Latin America. Achacaf wears a brocade robe over a white silk qamisa, red sarāwīls and red open-toed boots. His brocade cape is fastened with an elaborate gold buckle. His head covering is an orientalist fantasy, a Phrygian cap with a striped scarf loosely tied around it.

Even before these canvases were dry, Zurbarán was contracted to paint more works for the Franciscans. These commissions established him as Seville’s foremost artist, but his situation was not without challenges. He had never passed the city painters’ guild exam, which angered his competitors. The city council was forced to make an unprecedented statement calling Zurbarán ‘an ornament of the republic’ who should be persuaded to live in the city. In 1630, a delegation from the guild visited Zurbarán’s workshop and demanded he pass the examination. He refused and the city council turned a blind eye. Within weeks he was working on a painting for the council headquarters.

His reputation soon reached Madrid. In 1634, he was commissioned to produce ten paintings of the labours of Hercules and two battle scenes for the Salon de los Reinos at the Buen Retiro Palace, recently created for Philip IV by his valido, the Count-Duke of Olivares. The room housed twelve large-scale paintings of the young king’s major victories, including Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda. The Labours were to hang above these; they have a strange perspective when viewed at eye level. According to the 13th-century De Rebus hispaniae, Hercules was the founder of the Spanish monarchy. The prototype of heroic virtue, he was also the ideal avatar for Philip. Zurbarán boldly portrayed the demigod as an awkward peasant. Philip was apparently delighted. On view in London are Hercules and Cerberus and Hercules and the Cretan Bull. Once again, Zurbarán used prints as a reference, but only in the loosest sense. With no tradition of drawing the nude in early 17th-century Spain, prints were useful sources, even if Zurbarán clearly employed a life model too.

The most surprising work in the exhibition is the recently attributed Colossal Head (c.1635). It is huge, more than two metres tall, depicting a man’s face in close-up. He stares at us fiercely, all beard, shaggy hair and eyebrows. The painting is a complete mystery. There are no known precedents for a painted head study on this scale. It is first documented on a staircase of the Buen Retiro Palace in 1661. As this is thought to be where Velázquez’s so-called ‘buffoons’ hung, one theory is that it portrays a giant. Early Modern Europeans were fascinated by giants, giving rise, for example, to Giambologna’s 11-metre-high Apennine Colossus. The Prado, where the Colossal Head is now kept, prefers to compare it to busts of Roman emperors. When conservators X-rayed the canvas – no mean feat – they found an earlier version with no beard and short hair.

‘Colossal Head’ (c.1635). © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.

Returning from Madrid to Seville, Zurbarán started work on an immense altarpiece for the charterhouse of Nuestra Señora de la Defensión, near Jerez de la Frontera. (By this time he had several accomplished assistants, including his son and the Flemish-born Ignacio de Ríes.) Like many Spanish altarpieces, it was broken up in the 19th century. A small diagram in the exhibition offers a possible reconstruction. The Virgin of the Rosary, the Carthusians’ principal patron, was probably the central panel. It is interesting to compare Zurbarán’s Adoration of the Magi with Velázquez’s painting of the same subject from 1619. The compositions, based on a woodcut by Dürer, are very similar. But where Velázquez’s characters wear sober garments in earth colours, Zurbarán’s are dressed extravagantly in pink, gold and teal, with plumed hats, turbans and crowns.

The Virgin of the Rosary sits on a cloud of putti heads at the top of a small staircase, with a view of the heavens behind. At the bottom of the staircase, four life-sized Carthusians gaze upwards in prayer. The richly patterned stair carpet and flowers strewn across it are signifiers of life on Earth, a nexus between the mundane and the divine – a literal stairway to heaven. The Virgin and Child appear to occupy the same space as the monks. Close to the front of the picture plane, this is also our space as viewers. The Immaculate Conceptions and Crucifixions on display in another room of the exhibition adopt the same strategy. To paraphrase Victor Stoichita, the painter makes the inward vision available to all.

Although such visions were problematic, both inspiring faith and potentially corrupting it, paintings of them proliferated and – subject to authorisation by local bishops – were encouraged by the Church. St Teresa of Ávila compared her first experience to a painting. A different type of vision is depicted in Zurbarán’s representations of the incorrupt corpse of St Francis of Assisi, which is said to have appeared to Nicholas V in 1449. The exhibition includes the most disturbing version, signed and dated 1636. Francis stands in a dark space, looking ecstatically towards heaven. The strong side light gives him an uncanny presence. A second work, which belongs to the National Gallery and dates from around the same time, shows the saint meditating with a skull. The treatment of his habit, patched and torn from years of wear, is a masterclass in depicting cloth. Once again, an almost black background removes him from the mortal world. When the painting was acquired in 1853, one MP attacked it in the Times as a ‘black, repulsive picture’. It was a perfect example of the so-called ‘Black Legend’, which cast the Spanish as cruel, intolerant and backward.

The paintings of rosy-cheeked young women in the same room couldn’t be more different. Depicting the costumed virgin martyrs that appeared in feast-day processions, they were in constant demand in Seville and the New World. Their exquisitely dressed subjects were conceived as symbols of Christian virtue, though some considered them excessively profane. Zurbarán and his workshop produced dozens of such works, sometimes in series of 12 or 24, sometimes as pairs and one-offs. The quality was consequently variable. Undoubtedly autograph is the fabulous St Margaret of Antioch, again from the National Gallery’s own collection, as a shepherdess. She wears a red wool dress over a fine chemise, a blue cape with a shearling collar and a straw sombrero. She carries a patterned saddlebag and holds a prayerbook and shepherd’s crook. Behind her is the dragon whose belly she is said to have escaped from after it swallowed her whole (she’s the patron saint of childbirth). Next to Margaret are two other gorgeously dressed figures, St Casilda and St Apollonia. While the faces of these women are idealised, two other virgin martyrs on display are almost certainly commissioned portraits a lo divino of sisters on the cusp of adolescence.

‘St Margaret of Antioch’ (1630-34). © The National Gallery.

Between 1636 and 1649, Zurbarán and his workshop painted dozens of series, not only of virgin martyrs, but also of the tribes of Israel, archangels, apostles and emperors on horseback. Many were shipped to the Viceroyalty of Peru, which had few European-trained artists. Two paintings from his Sons of Jacob series, Asher and Joseph, feature in the exhibition (both are from Auckland Castle, which I wrote about for the LRB in 2020). How involved Zurbarán himself was in the painting process is a moot point. The Auckland paintings are impressive, but most if not all the serial works that survive in Spain and Latin America today show no trace of his hand. Exports were an important source of income, but given the risk of damage or loss at sea, most paintings were sent on spec, at a very low price. Although Zurbarán had relatives in Lima, he often had to trust other intermediaries to secure payment and fought at least one court case against the captain of a ship transporting his canvases across the Atlantic.

One of the highlights of the exhibition for many will be the room of still lifes by Zurbarán and his son Juan. As the excellent wall texts explain, their contribution to the genre was significant. One of the curators’ coups has been to secure Zurbarán’s only signed and dated still life, the Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633), from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The objects appear side by side, but separate from one another, on a wooden surface. The uncluttered and balanced composition creates a sense of stillness unmatched by most other artists of the period. It is comparable only to the still lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán, who in 1604 took vows at the charterhouse of Granada. Both artists infuse their work with a spiritual charge, exemplified in the Pasadena painting by the cup of water and the rose, symbols of the Virgin Mary.

‘Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose’ (1633). © The Norton Simon Foundation.

The final room of the exhibition mostly displays works produced in Madrid, where Zurbarán spent the final six years of his life. Juan had died in 1649, during an outbreak of plague that halved Seville’s population. The painter in The Crucified Christ with a Painter (1650), the only known work on this theme, has been identified either as St Luke, who is said to have painted the Virgin, or as Zurbarán himself. Either way, it shows us a man appealing to Christ, perhaps trying to make sense of his faith at a terrible time. In Madrid, Zurbarán began to work on a more intimate scale, making paintings for private devotion. Many feature the young Virgin Mary as an affecting model of piety and purity. Others, such as the almost monochrome Agnus Dei or the Veil of Veronica, invite us to contemplate different levels of reality. This is a gentler Zurbarán, a very different figure from the bold painter of his earlier years but just as entrancing.

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