Shimmering robes and bound lambs

Finally emerging from hibernation again….  I’m afraid I go through spells where I find it very hard to work up enough enthusiasm to write things and I’ve been through one recently.   I should really have found lots to write about the exhibition of Viennese Secession portraits (actually covering a much wider time frame) at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy show of Daumier’s work which, for once, focused more on him as a painter than his better known graphic art satirising (mostly) safe subjects in the France of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire (his reputation as a fearless opponent of censorship is rather exaggerated; when it became clear that the authorities were going to play hard ball over press control he, and those he drew for, took the hint pretty quickly).   Maybe I’ll get round to writing about these eventually, taking a longer perspective….

What jolted me back into action was an exhibition in Brussels- for once the timing of my meetings meant that I was able to catch a late night opening.  This brought together paintings by Francesco de Zurbaran; fascinating in their own right but also forming an interesting compare and contrast exercise with the Murillo show at the Dulwich gallery last year.   The two men would presumably have known each other, though Murillo was some twenty years younger.  Both were active in Seville in the mid 17^th century, though Zurbaran was not a native of the city and moved around rather more, taking on commissions in Madrid and finally moving there for the final years of his life.  Both painted a great deal of devotional material for patrons in the local church establishment (Zurbaran seems to have been the go-to option for certain monastic orders, in particular the Mercedarians, an organisation dedicated to ransoming Christian captives from captivity in the North African emirates commonly known as the Barbary States).   Both enjoyed an enormous vogue in 18th and 19^th century Europe- reflected in the systematic looting of their work during the French occupation of Spain in the Napoleonic Wars.  Both rather fell out of favour as the 19^th century wore on- too much part of the religious culture of Counter-Reformation Spain and at the same time too sentimental for more modernist tastes which tended to prefer the more apparently “secular” Velasquez while valuing El Greco above the lot.  Both have however seen their reputations rise somewhat in more recent times.

Obviously there are major differences.   For one thing, Murillo seems to have been responsible for Zurbaran’s final relocation to Madrid, at least indirectly.  As I pointed out in my earlier piece about the Murillo show, Seville was a city under enormous strains by the late 1640’s.   Plague carved a swathe through the population; while the majority of those who died were the impoverished slum dwellers who figure in Murillo’s genre works, it carried off many of the better off as well, including Zurbaran’s son Juan (himself a rising artist specialising in still lives).   Patronage dried up as the economy tottered under the impact of war, high taxes and disease- and Murillo’s well-connected workshop increasingly cornered what market remained.   Zurbaran’s style also seems to have been going out of fashion by the late 1640’s; certainly when he relocated to Madrid his style shifted towards smaller, much more “conventional” paintings- and became a lot less distinctive, at least in my view.   It’s interesting that even before he moved north Zurbaran had become increasingly dependent on painting more or less speculative cycles of work aimed at the colonial market in the Americas- presumably a rather less sophisticated audience.

There are also obvious differences between the two artists in terms of content.   Though Zurbaran did a number of works which projected sacred events into contemporary interiors (various paintings of the child Jesus and his mother at home- images which imply that St Joseph was a carpenter with a very successful business indeed, able to afford the comfortable lifestyle of a prosperous senior guild master), he never went outside into the mean streets of Seville to create genre works.  His output was almost entirely religious- there is only one, rather unconvincing, secular portrait in the Brussels show and very few secular works of any kind.   It’s tempting to think that this may reflect something of the man’s personality and conclude that he was a much more overtly devout individual than Murillo.  He was certainly much less given to promotion though self-portraits.  No securely indentified self-portrait of Zurbaran survives and it’s revealing that the main candidate for that role is the work at the top of this piece, depicting St Luke contemplating the crucified Christ.  This is a strange piece in many ways, playing all sorts of games with depiction and reality.   The painter carries his palate, half way between a saintly attribute and the practical working tool of the jobbing artist sizing up his next commission, but there’s no easel or canvas in sight.   What is our role, as spectators to the encounter?  And where are we- at Calvary or in the imagination of the artist, inspired by the intensely visual devotional culture encouraged throughout Catholic Europe from at least the 15^th century?

The slightly strange lighting effects and the extreme attention paid to the fabric of Christ’s loincloth are typical of Zurbaran’s most distinctive work.    His love of deep light and shadow effects reflects the influence of Caravaggio even if Zurbaran’s reverent depiction of saints in ecstatic contemplation of the infinite is far removed indeed from the Italian painter’s habit of placing events from sacred history in the nether world of the taverns and slums of his own time.   The influence must have come indirectly; Zurbaran never left Spain in his life and I suspect he would have been as likely to see Flemish art of the so-called “School of Light”- also deeply influenced by Caravaggio- in Seville as any works by the man himself.  At times the lighting effects are so extreme that depictions of saints become almost abstract, as with St Francis below.   The saint’s face is so deeply shadowed by his hood that he’s scarcely identifiable as an individual at all, while the light flows round the fabric of his habit and reflects off the skull he is meditating upon.  This is perhaps an extreme example of its genre- other depictions of St Francis (including one in the National Gallery in London which has always been a bit of a personal favourite of mine) show a little more face and his later works are far less “radical” in their simplification of the composition- but none the less interesting.  Perhaps its very radicalism helps to explain why Zurbaran’s style began to fall out of favour even in his lifetime, forcing him to paint much more conventional pieces later- there’s a lovely (and maybe a bit too-good-to-be-true) story of a Zurbaran painting being discovered during the 19^th century in a convent attic to which it had been banished because the nuns found it too scary to hang in the church.

The fascination for the interplay of light and fabric, as well as an almost tactile enthusiasm for depicting the fall and folds of clothing, are also marks of Zurbaran’s style.   The dazzling white of the habit of the Mercedarian brother below illustrates this aspect nicely.   The colour is surely too good to be true in a world without  detergents or washing machines and reliant on natural fabrics (leaving aside the theological issue of whether a religious order vowed to personal poverty really ought to have been spending money and effort on keeping their habits gleaming white); no doubt the symbolism of purity is important here but one senses that Zurbaran’s love for depicting fabric goes some way beyond this.   

 The love for clothing and fabrics can be seen in the large format paintings of mostly rather obscure female saints which he produced for the colonial market like St Casilda below (for the record, St Casilda was, according to pious legend, the daughter of an 10^th century Moorish ruler of Toledo; she did good works, converted to Christianity and lived as a hermit to the age of nearly a hundred).   These saints are invariably sumptuously dressed young women dressed in Zurbaran’s fantasy of what the height of fashion in the remote past would have looked like.   In some ways they’re rather odd depictions, more like court ladies than holy women, and cast an interesting sidelight on how devout Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic imagined the court of Heaven.   

Perhaps the strangest works probably produced for the colonial market (though they don’t appear to have got there) are the set of paintings of Jacob and his twelve sons.   These ended up in Auckland Castle in north east England, purchased (apart from one which found its way to another stately home and had to be replaced with a copy) by the then bishop of Durham in the early 1750’s- supposedly as some kind of act of regret for the failure of Parliament to pass Jewish emancipation legislation.   They had a moment of celebrity in 2011 when the Church of England thought about selling them and they were purchased by a millionaire banker with roots in the region who then set up a trust to ensure their preservation in Auckland.   There seems to be a lot of uncertainty over their pre-Auckland history and they’re certainly not what you’d expect to find on the walls of an episcopal residence in northern England (though presumably the Old Testament subject matter made them acceptable in Protestant circles allergic to saintly ladies).    Four of the works made their way to Brussels; Asher can be seen below.   The commission allowed Zurbaran to give full rein to his fantasies; the figures are remarkably varied in look and clothing (the sense that each son is already the leader of a specific tribal grouping with very diverse looks and customs is quite strong), all set in a strange imagined classicising landscape.  

I have to admit that I found Zurbaran’s work very uneven in quality and degree of interest.   I’ve already mentioned that his later works don’t do it for me, and I’m afraid (as with Murillo) I can only look at a limited number of Immaculate Conceptions before my eyes glaze over (Zurbaran’s handling of this theme became increasingly formulaic over time anyway).  A lot of his more ambitious compositions look stiff and clunky and he was very hit and miss when it came to depicting people, particularly young women- his Virgins are all too often pudding faced and insipid and his angels rather too chocolate box for my taste.  Of course “Zurbaran”, in common with almost all 17^th century painters, was a workshop rather than a single artist and a substantial if unspecified part of many of his works would have been painted by assistants but (at least to my eye) he seems to have had more quality control problems than some.  Maybe he took on rather too many commissions, just possibly the process of scaling back optimistic 18^th/19^th century attributions has not gone far enough with his oeuvre.  Maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste and the lack of a shared religious faith; his depiction of the Lamb of God as a very literal young sheep bound and ready for slaughter, its special status marked by a faint halo, is undoubtedly very effective but strikes me as faintly creepy.   A devout Christian would perhaps see it rather differently.  

One area which got a bit of coverage in the Brussels show but where I’d have really liked more was Zurbaran’s qualities as a painter of still lives.  Unlike his son, who produced rather typically overblown baroque specimens of the genre, full of piles of over-ripe fruit and rather blatant allegories, his still lives tend to be very restrained.  Many of them concentrate on jars or other bits of humble household ware- the example below could almost be an ancestor of the works of Giorgio Morandi which I’ve written about before.     

How far these works were meant to be free-standing pieces is unclear; certain items and even complete compositions appear as minor parts of bigger works (as with the piece below) so perhaps they were preparatory sketches.   Whatever their status for Zurbaran, they’re wonderful little windows into the lived reality of 17^th century Spain.