If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.
Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in.
Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble
The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist looks as though it has been wrapped around a sculpture rather than painted onto canvas, hanging with such convincing weight that you almost want to reach out and catch it in case it slips.
And that was only the beginning. Over the next four decades, Zurbarán painted monumental saints, bloodied martyrs, ecstatic Virgins and vast multi-canvas scenes that once lined the walls of convents and monasteries across Spain. He worked for private patrons, the court of Philip IV of Spain and clients across the Spanish Americas, where more than 100 of his paintings ended up. And now, improbably, many of them are here, thanks to loans from institutions including the Louvre Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museo del Prado. It can’t have been easy to pull together either: some of these look like they would have struggled to make it through the door.
Zurbarán painted to inspire devotion with a total conviction, whether it was the flesh of Christ, the rough folds of a monk’s robe or the bloom on a lemon. Four centuries later, the paintings still inspire that same kind of awe and fixation in the people standing before them. No wonder artists such as Salvador Dalí became obsessed with him. Visit the National Gallery this spring, and you might find that you do too.
