Emerging from a dark background, the austere figure has been both idealized in its quiet, graceful beauty and elegant rendering and humanized by the individualized face and insistent realism". Conforming to Counter-Reformation dictates, the artist depicted the event occurring not in a crowd but in isolation. According to the exhibition description for this painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, Zurbarán "envisioned the crucified Christ suspended outside of time and place. These features foreground him in sharp contrast to the black background against which he is placed. The intensity of the moment and the agony of Christ is present, not just in his expression, but also in the way Zurbarán rendered the figure bathed in the light emanating from his pale skin and from the white linen wrapped around his waist. Here, an example of the former, we see the emergence of the Baroque style for which Zurbarán would eventually become world renowned. Indeed, according to curator Almudena Ros de Barbero, Zurbarán "executed some thirty works on this subject" though these fall into two categories: "the Christs who are still alive and taking their last breath and those who are dead". This work is thought to be the artist's earliest known take on a subject that would become a theme throughout his oeuvre. Here Christ is nailed to a cross set against a blank black background. Crucifixion was commissioned by the San Pablo el Real monastery. Most of Zurbarán's output was produced for religious organizations in Seville. This shift was not met with universal approval, however, with some historians suggesting his later work had sacrificed their palpable aura of spirituality for a wistful sentimentality. Though Zurbarán carried the earnest storytelling legacy of the Baroque into his later devotional paintings, his figures become more idealized - more mythical - and less realistic in form.Such a strategy merely cemented Zurbarán's Counter-Reformation worldview: just as the spiritual exists in the corporeal, so the heavenly finds its expression in the natural world. Though not a landscapist per se, his mature works reveal an affinity with his natural environment and a deft hand when rendering nature as a narrative feature.
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