The latest book by the late New York art critic Peter Schjeldahl, The art of death (2024), starts with a bang. Upon being told that he is dying of cancer, Schjeldahl has a unique reaction: he organizes a trip to Madrid, for the sole purpose of spending a significant amount of time in 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 for anyone who finds great joy in life in looking at things, although I personally wouldn’t take Steve Martin along for the ride. He’s very funny. It will be a distraction.
With Zurbarán in the National Gallery in London, you don’t need to go to Madrid to enjoy the master’s works. The exhibition represents the first major UK exhibition ever of Zurbaran (1598-1664), and includes more than 40 paintings drawn from the Prado, Louvre, Art Institute of Chicago, Thyssen-Bornemisza, Cleveland Museum, Norton Simon and the gallery’s own collections. The exhibition spans a career that extended from Seville – then one of the richest cities in Europe, its port directly linked to trade in the Americas – through a prestigious short painting of Philip IV in Madrid.
|
“Zurbaran“ |
This last segment produced some of the most unusual – we might say “most distinctive” – acts on the show. Hercules and Cerberus (1634) emerged from an invitation received by Zurbarán to help decorate Buen Retiro, Philip IV’s new pleasure palace in Madrid. This work turned out to be his only royal commission, his only classical subject, and his only significant treatment of the male nude. Amidst all the Spanish battle scenes and portraits of the royal family, this painting looks particularly raw. All of Hercules’ muscles are on display as he pulls the three-headed hellhound out of the underworld with a rope, his club at the ready – the job was to drag the monster alive, not kill it. And see how the deep black burns through the fiery orange of the underworld beyond. He absorbed the harsh and natural style of Caravaggio’s followers into something more direct and eccentric. There is something strange about the artwork, but it is unmistakable. Even in the royal palace, it means that Hercules is hardworking and not arrogant.
Fashion has to be a staple of any exhibition held these days, and there’s a room in London’s National Gallery that proves Zurbarán to be Spain’s first fashion designer. Saint Casilda (c. 1635) would be a good example of this. In a background that may also be theoretical, it looks like one of those elaborate cakes featured in a televised baking competition, a beautiful tower of silk, taffeta and brocade. Her dress is subtle enough to be a fabric, and the color is strange. This was almost the trend of the era, with the preacher Bernardino de Villegas complaining that such saints were so “obscenely dressed” that they were reading figures from heaven less like “ladies of the world.” He might have been jealous of her pretty red skirt.
Agnus Dei (1635-40) collects everything else in the room. You can lose yourself in the details of the work – the lamb’s tangled, snowy wool is rendered so realistically, but like a mountain, the shadows on its curved horns are so subtle, does its face shine with divine light? -You may not even notice that this sheep is about to be slaughtered. Zurbaran looked life square in the face, and saw in it all its beauty and depth.
More show reviews
