Zurberan

                                             Zurberan 

Spanish Catholic iconography has always fascinated me, in a mostly horrific way. Writhing martyrs, vivid crucifixions, pious sugary virgins- to visit museums and churches is to run a private league table of the most grotesquely spectacular images. The Counter- Reformation Catholic Church demanded of its artists the utmost realism, actual or imagined, to intimidate and inspire the faithful with the reality of the holy supernatural according to Rome.

Lurid Counter Reformation art was not of course confined to Spain. Caravaggio, for example, pioneered many of the heightened naturalistic techniques, and gruesome detail (self-portrait beheadings a speciality) that inspired Spanish artists. But Spain in the early C17 was especially Catholic and especially intolerantly so.

This was not so much in response to the Protestant reformation, which barely threatened the Iberian peninsular, but because of the centuries long and finally successful wars of conquest against Islam and the subsequent repression of the remaining moorish population- convert or go. For good measure, Jews were also forced to convert or be expelled.  But  official suspicion remained that secret heresy continued. The Church, with the backing of the State, asserted itself against these perceived deviations with actual persecution (the Inquisition ) and with aggressive illustration  of Catholic primacy in religious practice, architecture and art.

Spain in the early C17 was also especially rich. It greedily exploited the vast wealth of its newly established empire in the Americas. Much of that wealth found its way to the Church, and funded the great outpouring of pious creativity.

Sevilla was especially wealthy, being the monopoly gateway to imperial sea traffic. It is the city where one of the stars of the Spanish Baroque, Zurberan, made his name. An exhibition at the National Gallery displays his virtuosity across several styles of religious art.

There’re stark, dark, unsparing crucifixion pictures, focussed on the suffering and tortured central image rather than mourning. A moving exception shows one mourner: a man with a painter’s palette. This is St Luke, patron saint of painters. But could it also be Zurberan himself?

There’s the weird (but totally Spanish Catholic) picture of St Francis , standing with open eyes upturned in prayer, surrounded by darkness . Only- this is the saint’s corpse,miraculously preserved in upright posture in his tomb.

Zurberan’s female saints come in stereotyped ranks: demur, fully clothed, half turned towards the viewer and with no suffering visibly inflicted . They could be ancestral portraits, apart from (in one case) a chastened dragon lurking obscurely in the background,

There are big pictures of Mary, some of them huge alterpieces. The colour palette is bright and soft, the images sugary and pious. Mary is often depicted as borne aloft by a host of upskirting putti, visible mostly as so many little heads, newly-hatched munchkins. The altarpieces were created for religious orders, and feature, at “earth level” the upturned rapturous faces of the relevant monks.

The Counter-Reformation demanded of Catholic artists either overwhelming sentimental piety or grisly but holy horrors. Naturalism connected the faithful with the holy with compelling images. Distracting earthy secular detail was frowned on and censored. No Brueghel Calvary details, as described by WH Auden in his poem ‘Musee de Beaux Arts”, where the painter sets holy suffering in:

Some untidy spot

where the dogs go on with their doggy 

Life and the torturer’s horse 

Scratches it’s innocent behind on a tree..

Domestic detail in religious painting was tolerated in certain circumstances . The Church invented a backstory for the childhood of Christ (largely passed over in the gospels) and his Mother. This allowed artists to imagine scenes form the early years of both Jesus and Mary.

Zurberan produced some pretty images that are in the exhibition, both of the pious child Mary; and Mary the mother with young Jesus plaiting a crown of thorns instead of a daisy chain (among other domestic everyday  features heavily charged with acceptable symbolism).

Zurberan did not have the range and inventiveness of his contemporary and friend Velasquez . But he did produce secular paintings, among which his exquisite still lifes stand out.

The exhibition has one historical piece, a perhaps obligatory subject for a painter of Sevilla- the surrender of the keys to the Christians by the Moors. It is not quite a grave and forbidding treatment. There’s a certain twinkle around the eyes and mouth of the supplicant Moorish prince.

June 2026