No one does high drama \u2014 the agony and the ecstasy, the deepest blacks and brightest whites, the crispest lines and most lucent objects \u2014 like the Spanish Catholic Baroque painters.<\/p>\n
There is a painting of Christ on the cross so exquisitely rendered, so realistically modeled in light and shade, it was said by an 18th-century writer, that everyone who saw it believed it to be a sculpture. This work, \u201cThe Crucifixion\u201d (1627), by the painter Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, who spent most of his life in the southern Spanish Andalusian capital, Seville, opens the exquisite and tightly curated survey of the visionary artist\u2019s work that is on through Aug. 23 at London\u2019s National Gallery.<\/p>\n
Zurbar\u00e1n, who was born in 1598, initially trained as a sculptor. This, perhaps, accounts for his innate understanding of the human body in the round, and of the power of corporeal presence \u2014 particularly in paintings whose purpose was to inspire devotion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Crucifixion,\u201d his earliest signed work, was hung in the sacristy of San Pablo el Real, a 13th-century Dominican convent (and onetime seat of the Inquisition in Seville) that had hired the artist to produce 21 paintings over the course of just eight months. Many more such commissions would follow: The city\u2019s religious orders, increasingly prosperous thanks to trade across the territories of the Spanish Empire, competed with one another to create the most stunning buildings and decorations.<\/p>\n
In the low lighting of the room in which priests and attendants keep their vestments and dress for services, the painting \u2014 executed in an almost monochrome palette, with heightened chiaroscuro \u2014 must have been striking, not only for its realism: Christ, arms outstretched and head nodding limply, wears an elaborately draped loincloth whose various folds and swags seem to glow incandescent and bright, whites that are echoed in a crumpled piece of paper, nailed to the wooden post below, which faintly bears the artist\u2019s signature.<\/p>\n
The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n
Sumptuous textiles \u2014 even when plain, a loincloth or a monastic robe \u2014 are a mainstay in Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s work through his lifetime. The verisimilitude, the sense that one is regarding something holy, confected with just paint and canvas, but almost real enough to reach out and touch, was central to his work\u2019s sacred vitality. As if you could walk right into the narratives depicted \u2014 for instance, \u201cThe Adoration of the Magi\u201d (1638-9) or \u201cThe Circumcision\u201d (1639), which both show scenes from the early life of Christ.<\/p>\n
Or, as in \u201cSaint Francis of Assisi\u201d (1636) and \u201cThe Vision of Saint Alonso Rodriguez\u201d (1630), you might feel that you yourself were having a holy vision, as devoted and transcendent as the saint pictured.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Vision of Saint Alonso Rodriguez,\u201d that 16th-century Majorcan Jesuit who devoted his life to venerating the hearts of Christ and the Virgin Mary is shown in spiritual rapture. In the lower half of the painting, he appears in a sober setting, eyes raised to the heavens above, where the Mary and the Son of God, surrounded by cherubim and a choir of angels, look down on him. Each holds out a pink heart shooting out beams of light that radiate from heaven to Earth and alight on the breast of Rodriguez, where two black hearts flame.<\/p>\n
Saint Francis, conversely, is shown in his traditional brown robes and knotted rope belt, starkly lit from the left, eyes aloft and mouth open. We cannot see what he sees, but the texture of the plain cloth worn by the man who renounced material goods, his solidity as a figure, and the expression on his face, of absolute holiness, is transporting.<\/p>\n
Rooms in the exhibition are devoted to the beauty and precision of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s painting of fine garments, often used to depict saints like Apollonia, Casilda and Catherine of Alexandria, who are shown in garb that would have been familiar to Spaniards of the time and demonstrate the artist\u2019s knowledge of materials like silk and brocade.<\/p>\n
In the show\u2019s final spaces, the artist\u2019s technical facility, as well as his variety and creative innovation, is dazzling. A handful of still lifes of lemons and oranges, roses and teacups, ceramic cups and pitchers, show objects painted with astonishing clarity against backgrounds of profoundest blacks so that they seem ripe with offering.<\/p>\n
These are displayed alongside a series of works by Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s son, Juan, that are similarly accomplished and detailed \u2014 particularly given that he died at age 29 in a plague that killed almost half of Seville\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s attention to objects of the material world is just as divine as that of his overtly sacred paintings, though some of these still lifes were likely studies for details that would appear in larger works \u2014 as with \u201cA Cup of Water and a Rose\u201d (1630) and the moving \u201cAgnus Dei\u201d (1635-40), in which a lamb, legs trussed and eyes barely open, lies slumped forward in a narrow visual plane, waiting for slaughter.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Crucified Christ With a Painter\u201d (1650), a late work that seems peculiarly modern and meta, the death of Jesus is witnessed by a sole artist \u2014 Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters \u2014 who stands spotlit in a dark landscape, looking up in awe and grief. Is this a portrait of Zurbar\u00e1n himself? A brief image of the painter whose work shows that in the natural world, which includes the artist\u2019s studio, resides the miraculous? To paint is divine. What better way to spend a life of devotion than making this visible to others.<\/p>\n
Zurbar\u00e1n<\/p>\n