Francisco de Zurbarán, Spanish, Agnus Dei, c. 1635-1640, Museo del Prado.
My favorite museum is Madrid’s Prado, but every time I go to Chicago, I visit a Francisco de Zurbarán painting, The Crucifixion, at the Art Institute. That’s pretty consistent with my fondness for the Prado. I guess I like Spanish stuff, and there’s not that much Golden Age Spanish art outside of Spain. The Art Institute is in Chicago, which as a city is just a bit less well-known than New York, and relatively speaking it has a particularly good collection of Spanish art, which is just a bit less well-known than Dutch or Italian art. New York may have gotten the Dutch and Italians, but Chicago lucked out with the Spanish.
There’s nothing that really explains my attraction to The Crucifixion. It’s a big painting, Christ is at least life-sized, but it’s in a room of big paintings in a museum full of good stuff. In the room there’s at least one other Zurbarán, and I think a spectacular El Greco, but it’s The Crucifixion that I always remember. I am Christian, but lackadaisically so: father forgive me. When Jesus gathered disciples by the Sea of Galilee I’d likely as not have said I’d just as soon keep fishing. In these later days of evangelical paranoia I kinda wish most Christians would keep their mouths shut: if you’re Christian aren’t you supposed to expect persecution? Isn’t marginalization part of the package? But the religious particularly suffer from the curse that if you can think it it must be true. Maybe that’s part of what I like about The Crucifixion, its focus and austerity. There is no noise.
Zurbarán, born 1598 in Extremadura, was a contemporary of the better-known Velázquez, born 1599 in Seville. They both trained in Seville, were both court painters for Phillip IV, and both died in Madrid in 1660. It was the age of El Greco, Murillo, and Zurbarán. It was the age of Cervantes. It was the Golden Century, el Siglo de Oro. In Spain there was music and architecture and world domination. Spain was New York City.
During eight months in 1626, Zurbarán painted 21 paintings for the Dominicans of San Pablo de Real Monastery in Seville, including The Crucifixion. It was his first major commission, and established his reputation. Painting commissions for rich monks isn’t much of a thing anymore, but Seville in 1626 was rich as a Spanish grandee, and how else are monks going to spend their money? Wine, women, and song only go so far, especially if you’re a monk. Spanish wealth is in the history of that painting: the power and overwhelming religious devotion of Spain, the height of the Counter-Reformation and Spanish art. It’s a grand moment, cruel and unfettered, and all of that history hangs on the Institute’s wall with The Crucifixion.
But you don’t need the history. The painting speaks for itself. In that painting Christ is dead, pierced through the side. There’s nothing in the painting that points toward the certainty of Resurrection. The repose of the face doesn’t portray future life but release from recent pain. Maybe divinity shines in the luminous skin, but Christ’s skin is almost equally shadow. This Crucifixion is a lonely, isolated moment, powerful not in its divinity but in the ropey humanity of the muscles of Christ’s arms and torso, the collapse of the head, and the vulnerable turn of a knee.
Artists often display their technical chops by painting cloth, and Zurbarán’s loincloth is a bit of a drum solo. Zurbarán was adept at painting white cloth, and he often included draped white cloth in his paintings.* The loincloth is clean, draped, and uncontaminated by suffering. I suppose it adds some contrast to the otherwise rigid cross, and something is necessary to keep the privates private. Maybe it aids the composition by adding movement, but its lushness seems odd, inconsistent. It floats in space separate from the body and the cross.
Cynically I always think that the painting’s black background shares an artistic impulse with a velvet Elvis, and Zurbarán used the same background often, perhaps most famously in his Agnus Dei, the best of which is in the Prado. Maybe a Velvet Elvis in a Mexican market is a cultural remnant of those black backgrounds?
The focus on Christ alone is outside previous conventions of Crucifixion art, but the Counter-Reformation demanded it. In earlier European art the Crucifixion generally required an audience. It required Mary and the other Mary and some angels and some saints and maybe a halo and maybe the depiction of the patron who commissioned the painting, who just happened to be in Jerusalem for the long Passover weekend. There is an El Greco Crucifixion in the Prado that has so many people and angels–one angel catching in its hand the gushing blood from Christ’s side–that one wonders why all those witnesses didn’t just overpower the Romans and pull Jesus off the tree. Zurbarán gives us none of that. Zurbarán’s painting is a dark wooden crucifix on a lonely wall. It doesn’t portray devotion, it demands it.
It may also be that Zurbarán wasn’t very good at painting backgrounds. I’d like it to be more, I’d like there to be genius. His painting’s dark monochromatic bleakness (there’s a term for it, tenebrism) is often compared to Caravaggio, but there’s no evidence that he was influenced by Caravaggio other than shared mastery of extreme chiaroscuro. Whether influenced by Caravaggio or no the style was something of a thing in Seville. It shows up in early Velázquez, and Velázquez’s greater success must be in part because he could move so successfully beyond black velvet as a medium.
Whatever. This is a fishing blog, and I shouldn’t be writing about a painting. I should be writing about the ecological devastation of the Great Lakes. I should be writing about alewives, lampreys, round goby, and zebra and quagga mussels, of algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff and the coming invasion of the Great Lakes by Asian carp. This is decidedly not a Jesus blog, and the mysticism that a relatively obscure Spanish master inspires is probably going to doom this bit of self-indulgence to even greater obscurity. Still, right now this is also about Illinois, and of all things Illinois that painting is what I think of first.
