Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Francisco de Zurbarán
Spanish; 17th-century
Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado
88%
Still Life with Vessels. 1650. Oil on canvas
The black background and the front of the brown shelf court, respectively, the absolute negativity of an imageless image and the absolute positivity of a painting as a thing, that is, as a surface. (This is an anachronistic way of talking about Zurbarán, of course. In fact, anachronistically, the painting recalls David's Marat.) The vessels, however, mediate these extremes and, more importantly, mitigate their potentially damaging effect on the painting's ability to inhabit the realm of art. They accomplish this through their lovely volumes and immaculate illusionistic textures — look at the patches of light on the two tan vases! — but more substantially they accomplish it through the precision of their placement. Each thing is 3/4-twisted, pulling the center of the scene's gravity away from the picture plane and into the body of the image. And this takes place with such an inexplicable rhythm, as if the jugs were shimmying their shoulders out of sync. Which is all perfectly pleasant until you notice the clamshell rim of the second vessel from the left. Unlike its cocked handles, the vase's mouth is squared perfectly with the front of the picture: a small but clear indication of the fact of pictorial fiction which every other feature of the tableau has worked to overcome or deny. (TFS, 2026)
Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado
84%
The Crucified Christ with a Donor. 1640. Oil on canvas
This painting is, in some senses, more like Georges de La Tour than Diego Velázquez: a hardening of Caravaggism that somehow manages not to be a rigidification or stylization, and which avoids using too much brush to comfortingly enliven, as surface, the vacuousness of baroque space. (Turn space into surface is exactly what Rubens did with what he learned in Rome, to the detriment of Flemish art.) In this painting you can almost sense a terror at the task of imaging, which Zurbarán has sublimated into the incommensurability of his picture's two figures. Christ is richly bodied and casts shadows; the donor is flat and shadowless. Christ's dimensions signal the dimensions of the canvas itself; the donor seems ready to slink off the surface at left, as if he doesn't inhabit the same environment. Christ looks down at his body and thereby into the core of the picture; the donor looks out at the viewer. These diegetic inconsistencies serve, it seems, to protect the holy image of the crucifixion from the humiliation of being a fiction: it's the paste-on donor who takes this up for Christ. And yet, certain correspondences between the two figures signal Zurbarán's commitment — a very modern commitment — to establishing for his artwork a certain pictorial coherence despite its narrative fragmentation. Christ's feet and the donor's clasped hands correspond; the angle of his collar mirrors that of Christ's arms; the donor is oriented towards the interior of the painting, and every aspect of Christ seems to list just slightly rightwards in response to his presence; the pallor of the donor's face has almost exactly the value of the highest, most illuminated tones of the savior's flesh. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
83%
The Flight into Egypt. c1638-40. Oil on canvas
Zurbarán is the great Spanish Caravaggist, but there's another, perhaps a conflicting tendency at work in this painting, too: the tonality and even somewhat the spatial sense of El Greco's mannerism. El Greco's influence is less prominent than Caravaggio's, but it's there, and the tension between the two is productive and strange. It's all Caravaggio, of course, in the terse realness of Joseph's feet and in the perfect shadow his fingers cast across his palm; nor is there any of the Greek in the spreading darkness that molds the donkey's face and neck. But the pink of Mary's robes (if not the shadows between each fold) is El Greco, as are the streaks of light that hit Mary's lap and diffract across its surfaces. The composition, too, is less cinched than the Roman's tend to be, and the figures inhabit its space more ambivalently — more akin to the way Magdalen, with her weight, yokes foreground to back- in the El Greco in Worcester. While the complete, refined style of either of the two earlier masters are better than Zurbarán's hodge-podge here, it's also true that there's no mannered copying or unreflective mashing-together going on in this painting. Rather, it's alive with all the frantic movement right that goes on right before a synthesis. (TFS, 2026)