The survey of works by the seventeenth-century painter Francisco de Zurbarán at the National Gallery, the first of such scale in nearly forty years, has gathered almost universal praise in the press. Some critics laud the Spaniard’s facility in painting drapery; others marvel at the scenic oils recently attributed to him. Others still have focussed on the exhibition’s room full of still lives with lemons, remarkable supposedly for their subtle references to Zurbarán’s Seville and its history.
But the critics are wrong. As accomplished as Zurbarán is as a painter of religious scenes — the comparisons with Caravaggio are not unwarranted — he is also the maker of canvases rife with bizarre, overwrought symbolism and telling compositional failures. So confused is some of his allegory that it can only be made sense of with the tools of psychoanalysis, a theory of mind formulated by Sigmund Freud 250 years after the peak of Zurbarán’s career.
Zurbarán began his artistic apprenticeship in Seville in 1614, aged sixteen. The first of the many commissions he received from monasteries in the city came a decade later, by which time Zurbarán had married twice and fathered three children. His early artistic output consisted primarily of portraits of saints, including the extraordinary 1629 scene of the laying of The Body of Saint Bonaventure.
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The painting shows sixteen figures gathered around the dead holy man stretched diagonally on a catafalque decorated with rich orange and gold embroidery. This would be conventional, except Zurbarán disrupts the saintliness of Bonaventure’s white robes with a vividly red hat, one of the attributes of his Franciscan office, placed at the saint’s feet.
The men in Zurbarán’s scene ignore the object, but its placement on the canvas makes the same impossible for the viewer. What was the painter thinking to mark the thirteenth-century Bonaventure with this pool of blood crimson in a scene — to put this as subtly as possible — that contains not a single woman?
In the hang, such questions give way to marvel at Zurbarán’s better known crucifixions and single figure portraits, such as of Saint Francis in Meditation (1635-9), who kneels clutching a human skull. This is one of Zurbarán’s typically sombre, backgroundless compositions, in which light uneasily but captivatingly plays on the subjects’ robes.
The mix of virtuosity and discomfort continues in The Apparition of St Peter to St Peter Nolasco (1629), in which the former man hangs on a cross upside-down (so as not to emulate Christ), his mouth open, and his body in far too good a shape for the scene. Zurbarán gives this vision no setting, save for some crudely implied brownish clouds. While this is likely the result of the painter’s limited skill — elsewhere, he struggles a little with perspective — the voids do give his portraits an eerie feeling of helpless alienation incongruent with their subjects.
And it is for that clash that the images are fascinating. At a time when pictorial techniques for situating both real subjects and religious icons in a painterly world were well understood, Zurbarán chooses — subconsciously, let’s say — for many of his apparitions to appear in a dreamless kind of nowhere. This kind of a reading involves ahistorical projection, of course, but the Spaniard carries it off. Some of his works, like the 1635 Colossal Head of an unidentified man captured in extreme close-up, saturated with reality, may well be developmental illustrations for Freud’s concept of the ego. At the very least, they are the foreshadowing of Cubism.
The most psychoanalytically fertile material comes from Zurbarán’s adoration scenes. In numerous works, such as the 1632 The Immaculate Conception with Two Boys praying, figures are portrayed floating mid-air, standing atop a pile of disembodied… babies’ heads. This iconographic trope is not Zurbarán’s invention, but his putti, their eyes closed and features contorted, are far more tragic than the Baroque convention has it. And the heads are countless: one appears from the clouds, then a couple dozen. Eventually, the entire canvas might as well be composed of these now macabre creatures.
It is possible to read too much into this gesture, of course, but why wouldn’t one? Is it that Zurbarán’s first wife died in childbirth and that he resented his offspring for this? In The Vision of Saint Alonso Rodriguez (1630), for example, the cherubs are outright pathetic: the crushing force of the saint’s feet on their skulls is palpable. These images draw on much earlier conventions, granted, but they also prefigure later explicit depictions of fatherly resentment, such as Goya’s 1823 Saturn Devouring His Son. In a flight of extreme ahistorical fancy, the phrase “Q. And babies? A. And babies.” from the infamous 1970 anti-Vietnam War poster by the Art Worker’s Coalition perversely springs to mind.
The psychoanalytic point would be that far from being mere matter, the putti play a subtly determining role in Zurbarán’s paintings. This is not a popular reading: in a 1987 essay, the art historians Julián Gállego and José Gudiol accused the artist of harbouring “scorn for the narrative” on account of his often-reductive composition. Yet this critique is challenged by Zurbarán’s explicit narrative exaggerations, such as in his 1629 The Surrender of Seville, a complex scene which depicts the symbolic handover of the keys to the city after the 1248 siege by Ferdinand III of Castile. In the painting, Zurbarán endows the defeated qaid Axataf, the outgoing Muslim ruler of the city, with features that are outright caricatures by any age’s standards. The image is propagandistic, granted, but aren’t all Zurbarán’s works to be understood as the same?
If this critical exercise in Freuding-the-Baroque remains unconvincing, one image of Zurbarán’s establishes him indisputably as a painter of modern subjects. Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth is a feat of emotion that art historical lineages simply do not allow for in 1640, when the work was made. Zurbarán places his subjects at the opposite sides of the frame, with the Virgin looking over the young Christ with an uncanny mixture of concern, scorn, and… ennui. She has become distracted from her embroidery — top marks to Zurbarán for the draperies again — and that she can foresee her son’s fate is unbearable but also unavoidable.
Jesus, sitting on the left and clad in contrasting blue robes, has cut his finger on a thorn, again, in prefiguration of his passion. The paraphernalia of learning, such as books, are strewn across the scene, and the featureless interior is eerily Minimalistic. There’s a frameless window in one corner, but it is not the source of light; a wash of warm gleam elsewhere reveals a couple of Zurbarán’s putti.
The shock of this image is that if one were to look for a sentimental counterpart to Zurbarán’s arrangement, the closest match comes from Edward Hopper’s moody compositions, some four hundred years later. This alone doesn’t land the Spaniard on Freud’s couch but it does allow twenty-first-century viewers to connect with his subject matter as if it were their own life.
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