The dark mysticism of a master of earthy colour
Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) is the most overlooked of the great masters. Outside Spain he is barely known, and generally neglected.
Why? Primarily, because he specialised in painting monks. In fact, virtually all of his pictures were ecclesiastical, produced for monasteries and populated by clergy, saints, and other religious figures. The paintings simply lack the overwhelming impact of masterpieces by the Spanish titans: Velásquez, Goya, and El Greco.
The dark mysticism of Zurbarán’s work was appealing during a time of great religious conflict. In artistic terms, this meant dispensing with the extravagances of baroque and mannerism. They were considered too much of the flesh, full of sensuality, nudity, lust, and depicting Old Testament fables rather than New Testament truths.
In this milieu, Zurbarán produced majestic depictions of monks in various postures of prayer and meditation, the details of their robes rendered exquisitely. His colour palette may have been spare, but the complexity and nuance he brought to such limited subject matter was startling. No other painter had ever captured the dour tones of the folds of cloth or hessian worn by his pious subjects more sublimely.
He would routinely live in the monasteries while he worked, better able to experience and understand the secular lives in each specific Order.
Born in 1598, the virtually self-taught Zurbarán emerged from artisan obscurity through a most helpful second marriage to a wealthy land-owning widow. She introduced him to the civic leaders of Seville (then the fulcrum of Spanish wealth), patronage, and rapidly expanding communities of convents and monasteries. They would go on to provide Zurbarán with a continuous flow of commissions.
Zurbarán depicted his subjects with an overpowering sense of devotion. In the Martyrdom of St Serapion, for instance, painted in 1628, Zurbarán takes the grisly execution of Serapion and turns it into a transcendental reflection on the nature of death, conviction, and beatification. The background is dark, with deep shadows creating dramatic contrast between light and shade, the figure bearing no hint of the violence to which it has been subjected.
Serapion was believed to have been crucified in an X-shape, then disembowelled and dismembered. He had been tortured after having offered to stand in the place of a captured priest, but a delay in the delivery of the required ransom had proved fatal.
None of the horrific details are evident in this painting – Zurbarán chose instead to convey a still and calm portrait. The three-quarterlength figure of Serapion’s lifeless body fills the composition, emerging from the dark background robed in his pale beige habit. Candlelight allowed Zurbarán’s figures to loom outward, as if inhabiting the same space as the viewer. Serapion’s pose is reminiscent of Christ on the cross, and the fact that Serapion willingly risked his life echoes Christ’s own sacrifice. Zurbarán’s use of muted browns and creams adds to the subdued tone of the work, pierced only by the small yet prominent red and yellow Mercedarian (a Catholic mendicant order) badge on the saint’s torso.
The painting was a fitting subject for the Mercedarians in Seville, who commissioned it for a room in which bodies were prepared for burial. Founded on the ideals of self-sacrifice, the order was established in response to the suffering of religious believers during the wars between the Moors and Spanish.
Furthermore, at the time, a number of pirates were capturing ships and their passengers in the waters around Spain, and the Mercedarians took a cue from Serapion in offering themselves to take the place of those Christians being held for ransom, in the unlikely hope that funds could eventually be raised to free them.
Zurbarán was also commissioned by the Carthusian Order to paint the martyr St John Houghton, who was murdered in England in 1535 by being hung, drawn and quartered. In the painting, Zurbarán showed the saint holding out his heart, with a noose around his neck. His open habit is the only reference to his body being cut open, and he remains unmarked except for a small bruise on his forehead. Comparing this work with the
Martyrdom of St Bartholomew by José de Ribera, a prominent artist of the time, we see that Ribera’s painting contrastingly details the peeling away of the saint’s skin, to reveal his organs, muscles and tissues.
In bypassing the appalling nature of such a death, and instead conveying an atmosphere of serenity, Zurbarán emphasises the eternal reward of heaven.
Strangely, some of the most significant of Zurbarán’s paintings are to be found in Auckland Castle, County Durham. A series of 12 works known as The Tribes of Israel had been bound for convents in South America, but they were stolen in a pirate attack on a Spanish ship, and somehow ended up in this small British town.
Unfortunately, Zurbarán’s characteristic style fell out of favour later in his life, and, at the time of his death in 1664, he had become both virtually unknown and almost penniless.
Today, he is revered by several contemporary painters, who admire his use of earthy, understated colour to create works of electrifying power.
The nuance he brought to limited subject matter was startling