Francisco de Zurbarán

Francisco de Zurbarán (baptized November 7, 1598, Fuente de Cantos, Spain—died August 27, 1664, Madrid) was a major painter of the Spanish Baroque who is especially noted for religious subjects. His work is characterized by Caravaggesque naturalism and tenebrism, the latter a style in which most forms are depicted in shadow but a few are dramatically lighted.

Zurbarán was apprenticed 1614–16 to Pedro Díaz de Villanueva in Sevilla (Seville), where he spent the greater part of his life. No works by his master have survived, but Zurbarán’s earliest known painting, an Immaculate Conception (1616), suggests that he was schooled in the same naturalistic style as his contemporary Diego Velázquez. From 1617 to 1628 he was living in Llerena, near his birthplace; then he returned to Sevilla, where he settled at the invitation of the city corporation. In 1634 he visited Madrid and was commissioned by Philip IV to paint a series of Labours of Hercules and two scenes of the Defense of Cádiz, which formed part of the decoration of the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro palace. The Adoration of the Kings, from a series painted for the Carthusian monastery at Jerez, is signed with the title “Painter to the King” and dated 1638, the year in which Zurbarán decorated a ceremonial ship presented to the king by the city of Sevilla. The paintings for the Buen Retiro are the only royal commissions and the only mythological or historical subjects by Zurbarán that are known. His contact with the court had little effect on his artistic evolution; he remained throughout his life a provincial artist and was par excellence a painter of religious life. In 1658 Zurbarán moved to Madrid.

Zurbarán’s personal style was already formed in Sevilla by 1629, and its development was probably stimulated by the early works of Velázquez and by the works of José de Ribera. It was a style that lent itself well to portraiture and still life, but it found its most characteristic expression in his religious subjects. Indeed Zurbarán uses naturalism more convincingly than other exponents for the expression of intense religious devotion. His apostles, saints, and monks are painted with almost sculptural modeling and with an emphasis on the minutiae of their dress that gives verisimilitude to their miracles, visions, and ecstasies. This distinctive combination of realism and religious sensibility conforms to the Counter-Reformation guidelines for artists outlined by the Council of Trent (1545–63). Zurbarán’s art was popular with monastic orders in Sevilla and the neighbouring provinces, and he received commissions for many large cycles. Of these, only the legends of St. Jerome and of the Hieronymite monks (1638–39) that decorate the chapel and sacristy of the Hieronymite monastery at Guadalupe have remained in situ. Little is known of his production in the 1640s apart from an altarpiece at Zafra (1643–44) and records of a large number of paintings destined for Lima, Peru (1647). By 1658 both the style and the content of Zurbarán’s paintings had undergone a change that can be attributed to the influence of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. In his late devotional pictures, such as Holy Family and Immaculate Conception (1659 and 1661, respectively), the figures have become more idealized and less solid in form, and their expression of religious emotion is marred by sentimentality. Zurbarán had several followers whose works have been confused with his.

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