Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Francisco de Zurbarán
Spanish; 17th-century
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)