The latest book by the late New Yorker art critic Peter Scheldahl, The art of death (2024), starts with a bang. Told that he is dying of cancer, Schjeldahl has a unique reaction: he arranges a trip to Madrid, with the sole purpose of spending considerable time at the Prado. After you think about it for a while, it starts to make sense. There you will find the richest collection of paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya and El Greco. It’s relatable to anyone whose greatest pleasure in life is looking at things, although personally, I wouldn’t have brought them Steve Martin on the trip. He is very funny; it would be a distraction.
With “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London, you don’t need to go to Madrid to enjoy the works of this master. The exhibition represents the first major show that Great Britain has ever given Zurbarán (1598-1664) and features more than 40 paintings, drawn from the Prado, the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Cleveland Museum, Norton Simon and the Gallery’s own holdings. The show covers a career that started from Seville – at the time one of the richest cities in Europe, its port directly connected to the trade of the Americas – through a short prestigious painting for Philip IV in Madrid.
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“Zurbaran“ |
This last piece produced one of the strangest—we might say “unique”—works in the show. Hercules and Cerberus (1634) arose from an invitation Zurbarán received to help decorate the Buen Retiro, Philip IV’s new pleasure palace in Madrid. This work proved to be his only royal commission, his only classical subject, and his only significant engagement with the male nude. Among all the Spanish battle scenes and portraits of the royal family, this painting feels particularly raw. Every muscle of Hercules is on display as he drags the three-headed inferno out of the underworld on a rope, his club at the ready – the job was to bring the beast out alive, not kill it. And look how it burns, deep blacks shot with the fiery orange of the underworld behind it. He is immersed in the difficult, naturalistic style of Caravaggiofollowers into something more direct and quirky. A singular feature in the work, and yet unmistakably his. Even in a royal palace, this means a Hercules who is demanding and not arrogant.
Fashion must be central to any exhibition organized these days, and there is a room at London’s National Gallery that makes the case for Zurbarán as Spain’s first fashion designer. Saint Casilda (c. 1635) would be a good example of this. Against a backdrop that might as well be theoretical, it’s like one of those over-elaborate cakes from a television baking competition, a tower of teeth made of silk, taffeta and brocade. Her dress is elaborate enough to be a tapestry, and the coloring is extraordinary. This was almost a trend of the age, with the preacher Bernardino de Villegas complaining that such saints were “dressed so profanely” that they read less like figures from heaven than “ladies of the world.” It is possible that he was just jealous of her beautiful red skirt.
Agnus Dei (1635-40) collects everything else in the room. You can lose yourself in the details of the work – the tangled and snowy wool of the lamb so realistically rendered, but like a mountain, the shadows on his horns so delicately curved, is his face bursting with divine light? – so that you may not notice that this lamb is ready for slaughter. Zurbarán looked life square in the face and saw in all its beauty and inwardness.
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