zurbaran

Zurbaran: Two Takes on a Great Religious Artist

By Nora Hamerman
Special to the HERALD
(From the Issue of 2/1/07)

Called a “painter of monks” because of his numerous cycles of paintings for religious orders, Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664), of all the artists of the Spanish Golden Age, was the one who most consistently captured the expression of a sober and profound faith.
This winter, two of his most celebrated works are on view in separate loan exhibitions along New York City’s “museum mile” that stretches up Fifth Avenue from East 70th to 89th Street.
At The Frick Collection, Zurbaran’s “Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth” seems timely for the present liturgical season, between Holy Family Sunday on Dec. 31 and The Presentation in the Temple on Feb. 2. At the Guggenheim Museum, we find Zurbaran’s “St. Hugh in the Refectory,” which carries a lesson in abstinence that may prepare us for the approaching Lent.
St. Luke’s Gospel recounts that Jesus grew up in the house at Nazareth and obeyed his parents. In Zurbaran’s picture, a teenaged Jesus sits working near his mother, who holds embroidery on her lap. Mary looks sadly on as Jesus has just pricked his finger plaiting a crown of thorns. The painting is full of carefully described details, like clay pots, books, sewing basket, the white cloths—reminders that Zurbaran was a superb still life painter before he mastered religious painting.
Most of these elements are symbolic (the doves telling us the Holy Family was poor, the roses and lilies referring to the Virgin). The painting ultimately evokes the mass. The tilted table alludes to the altar, the figs to the Eucharist, and the flood of supernatural light from the upper left, edged by faintly drawn cherubs, announces the miracle of Transubstantiation as the supernatural and the natural come together.
“St. Hugo in the Refectory,” a painting more than ten feet wide, illustrates the miracle wherein the early Carthusians were confirmed in their rule of abstention from meat. When meat was offered to them, the monks mysteriously fell asleep, and they awakened only when their bishop St. Hugh arrived for a visit. The meat immediately turned into ashes, confirming the rule, which had been debated until that point.
The painting is one of Zurbaran’s first major works, made for Seville’s Carthusians and rarely seen outside Spain. Filled with exquisite still-life passages (ceramic jars that are recognizable as Talavera ware), the canvas also holds a “picture within the picture” of the Virgin and Child in a landscape on the rear wall. Baby Jesus at Mary’s breast sleeps rather than nurses, which seems to set a parallel to the scene below.
Both commissioned by monasteries, the context of the two Zurbarans in New York could hardly be more different.
At the Frick Collection, the picture of the Holy Family in Nazareth joins other important works from the era of the Catholic Reform, when artists tried to meet the challenges of the Protestant rebellion and worldwide evangelism by developing new styles and a fresh approach to the sacred stories. Several artists, including Zurbaran, used dark and light contrasts to heighten drama, and an earthy realism that brought the holy figures closer to the faithful.
The pictures at the Frick are among the prizes of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, lent while that institution is under renovation. Near Zurbaran’s picture is “St. Peter Repentant” by the French artist Georges de la Tour (1593-1652). The apostle sits in darkness, a humble fisherman in ragged clothes, dissolved in tears as he rues denying Christ. The cock who announced the sin sits on a table, while a lantern shines at Peter’s feet—the light of truth that makes us free.
At the Guggenheim Museum, Zurbaran’s canvas is in the exhibit “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History.” It includes other treasures of the Spanish Golden Age, such as “The Vision of St. John” by El Greco, and Murillo’s “Madonna of the Rosary” from the Prado in Madrid, one of the most popular pictures of the Virgin by that artist who specialized in Marian themes. Instead of hanging the pictures chronologically, the Guggenheim has arranged them by themes, the 16th and 17th century pictures flanked by paintings by such modern masters as Miro, Picasso and Dali.
These 15 recurrent themes all arose in 16th century Spain, when the Catholic Church “reaffirmed its dogma, structure and social role in the face of the burgeoning threat of Protestantism,” according to the overview of the exhibit. Such themes as the Crucifixion, visionary landscape, and the Virgin and Child are presented in their Golden Age originals, and then, as they have been seen in our secularizing age, by artists from the atheist Picasso to Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter who returned to his Catholic faith after 1940.