Word: zurbarans
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...Zurbaran's version comes right from the rhetorical heart of the Counter- Reformation. Dark, admonitory and raw, it seems overwhelmingly real in every detail, from the coarse weave of the woolen habit (with a frayed hole at the elbow, emblematic of poverty, brilliantly accentuated with a few impasto flicks of white light on the dangling threads to give a hint of contrast to * the massive carving of the rest of the forms) to the shrouded face whose eyes Zurbaran loses in blackness to suggest the hermetic nature of the saint's vision. His gaping mouth is doubled in the gaping...
...gathers up all the ecstatic and theatrical resources of Caravaggio's lighting and impacts them into one single figure. Zurbaran, living in Seville, never went to Italy and never saw an original Caravaggio in Spain, though he probably knew the copy of Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, which had been praised by his teacher in Seville, Francisco Pacheco. The crucified Peter who materializes upside down in a reddish visionary fog to the entranced St. Peter Nolasco in one of Zurbaran's weirder paintings -- an astonishing prophecy of late Dali as well as an echo of Caravaggio -- must have been...
Better than anyone else's, Zurbaran's work embodies the paradox of what the Spanish Counter-Reformation expected in church painting: that extreme spirituality lay in extreme realism. "Sometimes you might find a good painting lacking beauty and delicacy," Pacheco wrote in his Art of Painting. "If it possesses, however, force . . . and seems round like a solid object and lifelike and deceives the eye as if it were coming out of the picture frame," the lack of those qualities was forgiven. The real image made Christ or a saint real, ready to speak to you from the wall...
What we read in Zurbaran as influences of El Greco's "spirituality" struck Pacheco as mannered and distracting. He did not mention his ex-pupil in his book. But Pacheco was a dry, insipid painter, and Zurbaran's slightly awkward fierceness must have been disturbing to a man whose chief pride lay in being the father-in-law of Velasquez. Zurbaran would not master the sense of secular decorum, the discreet and far-reaching rhetorical power of Velasquez's much greater art. He did not try to, since he was mainly painting for monks, not connoisseurs. He and Velasquez studied...
Velasquez makes Zurbaran look primitive. One senses this even in Zurbaran's most ambitious work, the immense altarpiece he did in 1638-40 for the ) Monastery of Nuestra Senora de la Defension in Jerez, the majority of whose surviving parts -- scattered long ago among museums in America, Spain, France and Scotland -- have been reunited for the first time, in the Met, for this show. Its most beautiful panels, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision, are crowded with relatively still figures and seem to come out of the old world of Titian and Veronese. But when it came...