Francisco de Zurbarán (Fuente de Cantos, 1598-1664) was an artist appreciated and valued in his lifetime, who was overshadowed by the enormous shadow of the Council of Trent and his two brilliant contemporaries, Diego de Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. The painter who used beauty to visually convey the dogmas of a Catholic Church that launched the Counter-Reformation to stop the Protestant threat was dragged into the obscurantist legend that stained the Spanish Empire itself. And the desire of foreign collectors for Velázquez’s brilliant composition or Murillo’s seductive naturalism sidelined a master whom the National Gallery in London has now decided to do justice to.
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The exhibition Zurbarán, which will be open to the public at the London gallery from May 2 to August 23, brings together nearly fifty works by the Extremaduran painter (and universal Sevillian, due to his devotion and work for this city) and offers a contemporary and fair perspective of an artist who knew how to innovate and capture a religious symbolism that today represents a new artistic dimension.
Zurbarán works in the period after the Council of Trent. Much of the reason why all the works he was commissioned were religious subjects has to do with the Church’s express purpose of using art as a vehicle to spread the faith. It needed the paintings to be powerful, to strike the viewer. It needed to tell stories to people who could not read. They had to have that visual strength,” Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, a specialist in Late Spanish, Italian, and French Painting at the National Gallery and one of the curators of an exhibition that the museum team has taken several years to prepare, explains to EL PAÍS.
The exhibition begins with an emblematic painting, The Crucified Christ, a work the master delivered to the Dominicans of the Convent of San Pablo el Real in Seville, along with nearly two dozen paintings depicting scenes from the life of Saint Dominic and other saints. Zurbarán created many other crucifixions throughout his career, but this first one consecrated him as the artist whose work was demanded by all the religious orders of the city, the richest in the world at that time, as the Gateway to the Indies for trade with America.
Christ appears illuminated, with exquisitely detailed anatomy and an agonizing face, against a dark background that highlights the contrast of light and constructs a powerfully modern and minimalist image. “Zurbarán is not an artist who spends too much time establishing a landscape or contextualizing his images. He is mainly interested in the power of the painting,” Whitlum-Cooper explains. The art chronicler Antonio Palomino recounts that the painting, which was displayed with little lighting in the oratory of the convent’s sacristy, led many believers who came there to think it was a statue. Zurbarán learned both sculpting and painting in his early years, and his characters have a powerful three-dimensional presence that seduces and hypnotizes the viewer, despite critics always reproaching the artist for his apparent inability (or lack of will) to give dynamism to his compositions.
“These were paintings made for people who professed a strong Catholic faith, something that does not necessarily correspond to the audience now visiting the National Gallery. But the more I look at them, the more convinced I am that, whether you have faith or not, these are paintings that invite you to stop and spend time in front of them,” defends the exhibition curator. “That makes them something magical in a world like the one we live in, unstoppable and noisy. They are static paintings. They are not like Velázquez’s works. They don’t blink, they don’t move. They are monumental. They force you to pause, to a moment of silence and peace.”
Fabrics and still lifes
Zurbarán’s father was a cloth merchant, and his son acquired a wisdom about texture, colors, embroidery, folds, and draping of fabrics that he then exquisitely captured in his works, both in the sobriety or poverty of the clothing of saints and monks and in the finery of saints and princesses.
He has been called the “Spanish Caravaggio,” because his central works, such as the different scenes of Saint Francis of Assisi meditating, partake of the Italian tenebrism technique in which light and shadow build the architecture of the composition. But if the brilliant and quarrelsome Milanese painter, who was born 26 years earlier, sought to freeze dynamic scenes, Zurbarán pursues an immobile, eternal, and inspiring beauty. He avoids the macabre, as expressed in his masterpiece, Saint Serapion, which reflects the martyrdom of the Mercedarian friar, tortured in Algiers in exchange for the release of Christian captives. He was dismembered and beheaded, but the artist chooses to depict a pure, sweet, and peaceful figure of the martyr, whose bound hands and slightly swollen forehead suffice to symbolize his torment.
The exhibition dedicates a room to Zurbarán’s prodigious still lifes. His followers have wanted to see the religious symbolism that necessarily, according to them, had to be hidden in the paintings of an author devoted to spreading the faith, but perhaps, suggests Daniel Sobrino, another of the exhibition’s curators, it was only to demonstrate the extraordinary technical and artistic skill of his hands. “Because what we see in this painting that offers a perfect balance is what critics already discovered in the 1920s and immediately associated with the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso: the purpose of reducing nature to its simplest and freshest elements,” Sobrino explains in front of Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose.
The room dedicated to still lifes also includes the still lifes of Juan de Zurbarán, the painter’s son, who approached mastery in this type of composition before the plague that devastated Seville in the mid-17th century took him at 29 years old.
Some of the works from his time in Madrid appear in the anthology, where he worked alongside Velázquez in the service of Philip IV. Notable for the mystery surrounding its authorship is the Colossal Head, an immense face that adorned the stairs of the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid, about which little is known, neither regarding the character nor the possible theme of the work, which experts consider to be by Zurbarán.
In a historic exhibition that is the National Gallery’s main event in 2026, two works stand out above the rest. Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God, the piece chosen for the exhibition poster, is the best of the seven known paintings by Zurbarán on this subject. A Merino sheep, with its legs tied and ready for sacrifice, looks upward with longing eyes. The texture of its wool is of such technical precision that it invites the viewer to reach out and touch it.
And the Crucified Christ with a Painter, which shows Christ already deceased on the cross and, at his feet, an artist with palette ready, lips parted in amazement and ecstasy, and gaze devoted to the spectacle of the Passion. Little is known about Zurbarán’s personal life, and many want to see in this work his only self-portrait. But even if it is not, it represents a more intimate and symbolic portrayal of Zurbarán and his vital purpose of conveying the transcendent through the beauty of art.
