Art

...It was part of the unpredictability of Zurbaran that he could pass from the static fineness of detailing in St...

...The ceaseless variety that informs his oeuvre stems from his willingness to make virtually any kind of painting you asked of him...

...And yet it is a suitable close to an eminent, erratic life devoted to incarnating the visions of others...

...When he wasn't imitating gossamer-like fineness, he went all out on the sumptuous patterns of brocades, never with the exceptional detailing of Van Eyck, but with a wonderful sense of the rich stiffness of the starkly colored fabrics...

...The fact that the great Zurbaran was not the best painter of Spain's Golden Age, the seventeenth-century, the fact that he had to yield to the still greater Velasquez and Ribera, and to vie for third place with Murillo, is in itself enough to establish that period as a watershed in the history of visual imaginings...

...The composition is simply set against a hazy, indeterminate background, and all emphasis is placed upon the tender absorption of the main actors...

...The result of this facility is an emotional force deriving not so much from his own piety as from the promptings of his patrons...

...Once Zurbaran began to go out of fashion in the last two decades of his life, he found the greatest reception for his paintings in the New World, where the artists of Mexico and Peru had not yet entirely resolved the conflict between Roman Catholic imagery and native pagan forms...

...Of the four painters, Zurbaran is also the most distinctive and the least original...

...His compositions range from the busiest of the Baroque to the opulent quietness of a mosaic, his figures from beautiful porcelain dolls to creatures irrefutably of flesh and blood...

...This is as lugubrious and as uncompromisingly realistic as Zurbaran will ever get...

...Margaret to a dynamic, oily painterliness, akin to Velasquez's, in the depiction of three saints from 1634...

...It is suggestive that one of the subjects to v^hich he returned more than once was the famous meeting of Saints Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, the latter'the mystical Doctor Seraphicus, the former the hard-nosed logician, determined, through force of reason, to calibrate the orders of the angels...

...Thus it is necessary to bear with the master just a bit...

...If Ribera was the most intellectual of the four, who revealed in every painting an agile, cosmopolitan intelligence determined to impress itself upon the real world, Murillo is the harbinger of a liberated theology, spurning the constraints of intelligence, and surrendering unconditionally to the sweetness of enthusiasm...

...The finest of these is St...

...Already in the next commission, he had come closer to what we expect of him, drastically simplifying his depiction of the dead Saint Bonaventure, extending the corpse diagonally from one side of the composition to the other, and surrounding it with weeping mourners...

...Zurbaran was also a brilliant painter of fabrics, and some of his best square feet of painting depict those long and flowing robes that he loved, a summa of all the variations upon the pleat and fold...

...There is a touch of the fabulous and unreal in the clarity of the composition and the ashen sobriety of the faces, scarcely resembling anything else in Old Master painting...

...At the request of his "immaculist" Franciscan patrons, as opposed to the Dominican "fnaculists," he duly portrays the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on a crescent moon and with stylized halo...

...Velasquez, almost his exact contemporary, was one of the most deeply secular of earlier painters...

...It is this translation into visual terms of an articulated doctrine, rather than of any personal vision, that, more than anything, is likely to render Zurbaran's paintings strangely distant from the experience of the modern viewer...

...Yet, in general, he has suppressed symbols, in keeping with the pictorial austerity called for by the Council of Trent...

...John the Baptist," his last dated painting, is masterful in the subtlety with which it renders faces, fabrics, the unexpected fruits, and the soft wooliness of the lamb...

...In a depiction of St...

...The crucified Christ is represented, his head drooping in the emphatic reality of death...

...Francis from the late 1630s, the saint's face ' almost entirely concealed by the dark shadows of his cowl, his eyes raised to the empty night, we are in the presence of a bleakness of the soul starkly at variance with the popular perception of that historical figure...

...Of the four Spaniards, however, Zurbaran was the most Spanish, with all the febrile religious intensity of his native land...

...A brilliant clarity characterizes these visions, an uncanny realness in the hard white eggshells, the sturdy pottery, and the rendering of a lamb...

...For Zurbaran, optimism would have to wait until the last years of the artist's life, when an entirely new spirit swept through his art, a softness and sweetness that he learned from Murillo, the leading painter of the next generation...

...The Virgin and Child with St...

...Zurbaran was a syncretist, but within a single creed...

...Zurbaran, by contrast, is more pious than Velasquez, more passionate than Ribera, and more dogmatic than Murillo...

...This feeling of disappointment passes upon cLoser acquaintance, and Zurbaran comes once more to seem, as indeed he is, a formidable artist...

...Since his paintings will rarely be found to conform to any generalization, they must be considered case by case...

...He also had little difficulty in proceeding from the intimacy of these diminutive works to the grand manner of the five main paintings done for the monastery of Nuestra Senora de laDefension, in Jerez de laFrontera...

...Here fruits symbolize the Redemption, lilies and a water vessel the Virgin, while two doves are believed to refer to the Purification of the Virgin and the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple...

...ART THE VISIONS OF OTHERS ZURBARAN AT THE MET ecause Zurbaran's reputation is the way it is, the exhibition of his paintings that has just moved from New York's Metropolitan Museum to the Grand Palais in Paris will come as a revelation to many, and a disappointment to some...

...Compared with their Italianate tapestries, Zurbaran is the Grand Master of the crazy quilt...

...Zurbaran, who always left one guessing what he would do next, gave little indication that he would end on such a note as this...

...This was a genre in which beautiful, raven-haired girls were set against a pale background, the instruments of their martyrdom lying picturesquely about them...

...Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664) is the sort of Old Master whom it is easy never to have heard of...

...If, for example, you gave him a fifty-year-old engraving, two generations out of date, he would dutifully make from it a very respectable work of art...

...The startling and abrupt brilliance of his style derives from an exotic confrontation of received ideas of colors and form, lifted bodily from their incompatible contexts, and set down recklessly beside one another...

...JAMES GARDNER James Gardner writes frequently on the arts for Commonweal...

...To have assembled these in one room was perhaps the principal curatorial coup of the Metropolitan exhibition, and in their splendid display Zurbaran could be seen in one of his most classical and international of modes...

...Ribera, Velasquez, and Murillo created visual worlds that were effortlessly coherent within themselves, whose every brush stroke bore the imprint of their maker...

...Dating from 1627, when he was not yet thirty, it is the earliest work of his that we have...

...His stock in trade was a reality so real as to be shorn, even in his religious works, of the remotest shimmer of the spiritual...

...The exhibition at the Metropolitan began dramatically with one of the Zurbaran's most tenebrous paintings...

...Many people, coming upon these paintings for the first time, will consider his startling colors, his often daring figural juxtapositions, and his dramatic piety a most welcome discovery...

...This is because the present exhibition of seventy-one paintings, curated by the French scholar Janice Baticle, and attractively installed by the exhibition's coordinator, Walter Liedtke, ascribes to the master some disconcerting examples of studio work, while other paintings, though by Zurbaran, have not yet been restored to that pristine shininess that viewers have come to expect from first-rate museums...

...Be they Franciscan or Dominican, Mercedarian or Carthusian, Zurbaran could brilliantly accommodate the sometimes conflicting doctrines of whatever religious orders sought his assistance...

...It is almost as though a breath of the outer world, a shaft of intensely bright sunlight, has entered the deepest recesses of a darkened church...

...But only for a moment and then it has moved on...

...At the same time, he is well enough known through reproductions of his very best paintings that some art lovers may be saddened to find him often falling short of their expectations...

...Elsewhere, he used them more lavishly, as in "The Virgin and Christ in the House of Nazareth," possibly designed according to Carthusian devotional practices...

...His main chance to do fabrics was his depiction of young women as patron saints of monasteries and convents...

...Margaret of Antioch, poised and so painstakingly delineated that you can appreciate every weaving of the straw hat, every stitch of her striped saddlebag, every red and black bead in her coral necklace...

...One moment he might introduce the newest perspectival violence of Caravaggio, only to return in the next to the creaking medievalism of two-point perspective...