Each Francisco de Zurbarán oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
1598 - 1664 • Spanish • Painter • Baroque
"Monks of Zurbaran, white-robed Carthusians who, in the shadows, I Pass silently over the stones of the dead, I Whispering Paters and Aves without end, I What crime do you expiate with such remorse" - Theophile Gautier, 1844
Written when he was visiting Seville, Gautier's verse describes the haunting images of Zurbaran's praying and suffering saints. Even his life-size Saint Francis in Ecstasy (late 1630s) goes against the artistic convention of portraying Saint Francis in happy communion with the birds: Zurbaran's kneeling Francis is an intense and wrenching figure. The fervor of the Counter-Reformation infuses the paintings of Zurbaran, a devout Catholic who worked for many monastic orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans, Carthusians, Carmelites, and both Barefoot and Shod Mercedarians. It is for the last, the Shod Mercedarians, that he painted Saint Serapion in 1628. Believed to be of Scottish origin, Sera pion took part in the Third Crusade of 1196, and then, some 26 years later, joined the Mercedarians. On a mission to rescue Christians in Algiers, Serapion was killed for preaching the Gospel and converting Moslems to Christianity. Zurbaran's Saint Serapion is thought to have been painted for a monastery in Seville; it hung in the sala de profundis, where bodies of dead monks were held before burial. There are conflicting accounts of his martyrdom, and in the one Zurbaran illustrated Serapion was tied to a tree, tortured, and then decapitated. He may still be alive, but barely, as Zurbaran shows him, ropes around his wrists, eyes closed, his head (still attached) fallen onto one shoulder. The background is completely dark, in stark contrast to the creamy white habit that fills fully three-quarters of the canvas. Its heavy, rough fabric drapes and falls from his arms and shoulders in deep, complexly shadowed folds, each one magnificently described. The material itself takes on the importance of doctrine. CARAVAGGIO's influence is detected in the dramatic contrast of light and shadow, but Zurbaran's concentration is different, and the elimination of all background and extraneous objects sets him apart. His heightened material tactility is also outstanding in his STILL LIFE paintings, in which objects are lined up, also against dark backgrounds, and flooded with raking light. Lemons, Oranges, Cup and Rose ( 1633) are independent, self-contained, and ultimately untouchable objects that stand for something well beyond everything that meets the eye. "Zurbaran's whole point is the interpenetration of what is ordinary and unassuming with what is exalted and sacred so that ... the mundane and the supramundane change places," BRYSON writes.