Against an impenetrable black ground, the crucified figure looms pale and shining. There\u2019s almost no colour, beyond the trickle of blood on Christ\u2019s feet from the nails driven through his flesh. His head slumps, and his carefully modelled face is at peace (no agony here). But the most striking part of the picture is surely the loincloth, which folds and crumples and bunches around his midriff \u2013 you can imagine passing your hand over it, feeling the linen\u2019s volume and texture. In its original home, the monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville, the painting was displayed with \u201clittle light\u201d, according to the 17th-century Spanish artist and writer, Antonio Palomino. \u201cEveryone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.\u201d The paleness of the body, the fabric, must have loomed out of the dark like a vision.<\/p>\n
Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, who painted this solitary crucified Christ, is one of the three great artists of the Spanish 17th century. But, unlike his peers Vel\u00e1zquez and Murillo, he has never had a show to himself in the UK \u2013 until now, as his work forms the basis of a major exhibition about to open at the National Gallery in London. Compared with his precise contemporary and friend Vel\u00e1zquez (born in 1599, a year after Zurbar\u00e1n), his work can seem stilled, becalmed. You can see the contrast clearly, in works commemorating Spanish military success<\/a> that each of them were commissioned to paint for Philip IV of Spain\u2019s new palace, the Palacio del Buen Retiro. Both are now in the Prado. Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s The Defence of C\u00e1diz Against the English<\/a> has the quality of a frieze, as the Spanish generals look down serenely at the sea battle below. Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s The Surrender of Breda<\/a> is all drama, encounter: a quicksilver painting that captures time as it flees.<\/p>\n double quotation markReligious art was charged with a direct purpose: to move the viewer to devotion<\/p>\n Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s skill is different. His is an artist of inner vision, of meditation and contemplation. Time does not flee, but stands still. He has a paradoxical quality, making you wonder what it is that you are looking at, partly because he can make the immaterial seem solid and touchable, partly because at times his works depict two planes of reality simultaneously.<\/p>\n A double refraction of unreality \u2026 The Apparition of St Peter to St Peter Nolasco. Photograph: Federico P\u00e9rez\/Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado<\/p>\n Take one of the first in the National Gallery exhibition: The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, the latter saint being the founder of the Mercedarian order of friars, whose mission was to recover fellow Christians who had been captured by Muslims during conflicts in the Mediterranean. (The work was one of two dozen commissioned in 1629, early in Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s career, for the monastery of the Merced Calzada, Seville, now visitable as the city\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>.)<\/p>\n St Peter Nolasco is on the right, enrobed in white, and he \u201csees\u201d St Peter \u2013 crucified upside down \u2013 hovering on a backdrop of ochre clouds. But St Peter Nolasco hardly seems to be in the realm of the real himself. We are not \u201cwith\u201d him, wherever that might be (the shadowy background is entirely abstract). The painting seems to be offering itself as a double refraction of unreality, as if it was itself a vision.<\/p>\n There were good theological reasons for painting like this at the time: in the wake of the Council of Trent, whose deliberations defined the Counter-Reformation, religious art was charged with a direct, clear purpose: to move the viewer to devotion. Aside from the year or so that he spent in Madrid painting for the court in the mid-1630s, his career was largely based in Seville, and his clients were mostly the hugely powerful religious foundations of the city and the wider region.<\/p>\n Just then, Seville was wildly prosperous. Since 1503, it had had a monopoly on trade with Spain\u2019s viceroyalties in the Americas \u2013 a status of which Zurbar\u00e1n took advantage, sending out over 100 canvases for export to Lima, Buenos Aires and elsewhere. Zurbar\u00e1n did provide secular scenes for Philip\u2019s Buen Retiro \u2013 aside from his sea battles at C\u00e1diz, 10 paintings of Hercules pounding through his labours, as well as a curious, colossal head of a man that startles when it is glimpsed through the enfilade of rooms in the National Gallery. But it is in paintings of the divine and the spiritual that he excelled.<\/p>\n Pounding through his labours \u2026 one of many Hercules works. Photograph: \u00a9 Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado<\/p>\n Sometimes these commissions were on a stunning scale, and must have required a busy studio \u2013 as in the 24 paintings for the Merced Calzada in Seville, or the 15 x 10m altarpiece for the Carthusian monastery of Nuestra Se\u00f1ora de la Defensi\u00f3n<\/a>, just outside Jerez de la Frontera. The last monks moved out recently, and it is now possible to visit the honeyed-stone establishment, with its baroque facade stuck on to the front of the former 15th-century Renaissance frontage. But there in the church you have to imagine the full force of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s altarpiece, with its dozen paintings set between gilded sculptures since, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the dissolution of Spain\u2019s monasteries in 1835 these \u2013 like many other works in Spanish churches \u2013 were sold off and scattered.<\/p>\n Scholars have debated the altarpiece\u2019s original layout. The National Gallery\u2019s putative reconstruction has Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s enthroned Virgin in the most prominent position, flanked by his Adoration of the Magi and Circumcision. If the gallery is right in supporting this reconstruction, it will be the first time the works have been set alongside each other since the dissolution.<\/p>\n From the vast in scale to the intimate and hushed: some of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s most arresting works are not these busy, exciting scenes of saints and biblical stories but his remarkable small-scale still lifes. He was an extraordinary painter of the texture and weight of things. In a work in Seville\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts \u2013 not in the London show \u2013 the most thrilling part of the scene of St Hugh\u2019s visit<\/a> to the founders of the Carthusians is, to me, not the miracle of the meat turning to ash, or even the austere faces of the monks, but the exquisite breadiness of the bread rolls, and the smoothness of the blue-and-white ceramic carafes that, at the base, turn rough and unglazed.<\/p>\n Exquisite breadiness \u2026 Saint Hugh in the Carthusian Refectory. Photograph: Alamy<\/p>\n Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s son Juan \u2013 who died in the catastrophic outbreak of plague that robbed Seville of its prosperity and half its population in 1649 \u2013 made still lifes that provide an interesting contrast to his father\u2019s. They are more luscious, more overflowing with lilies, marigolds, jasmine, pears and lemons than his father\u2019s, where each object sits in its own space, self-contained. As in his paintings of visions of the divine, a small-scale row of dishes and vases made late in his career, around 1650, shines out against a sepulchral background.<\/p>\n An earlier work, from 1633, has a dish of citrons reflecting gold into their silver platter; a basket of oranges complete with a twig of leaves and blossom (accurately, since oranges flower and fruit simultaneously) and a cup of water sitting in a silver dish with a rose lying on its rim. The fruit and the flowers can be read as symbols of the divine. But as with Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s paintings of visions, these works seem to invite you into the illusion that you are seeing tangible things, objects over whose surfaces you want to run your fingers \u2013 and something otherworldly, things prompting contemplation of the supernatural.<\/p>\n Almost tangible \u2026 A Cup of Water and a Rose. Photograph: \u00a9 The National Gallery, London<\/p>\n The ambiguity in what we are being invited to see is at its strongest and most compelling in the final work in the exhibition. It is small, and you might whisk past it as you head for the exit, mistaking it for just another crucifixion with a praying figure in the foreground. But look again: it turns out that the figure standing before Christ \u2013 against another of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s darkened backgrounds \u2013 is a painter. In his left hand are brushes, and a palette loaded with paints that are surely just right for making the figure\u2019s very own flesh tones and robe. The artist\u2019s right hand is clamped to his heart, his ruddy face looking upwards in awe at his saviour \u2013 who, by contrast, is grey of skin and quite dead.<\/p>\n Who is this figure with his paints standing at the foot of the cross? At times he has been identified as St Luke, patron saint of artists. But it\u2019s irresistible not to consider him, in a sense, also Zurbar\u00e1n himself. It\u2019s impossible not to think about the very act of painting when looking at this work. Painting<\/a> as an act of devotion, wonder and prayer. Painting as a means of seeing the divine. Painting as a way of imparting visions that hover between the real and the unreal, the illusory and the tangible.<\/p>\n