Francisco de Zurbarán (baptized November 7, 1598 in Fuente de Cantos in Extremadura; † August 27, 1664 in Madrid) was a Spanish painter from the Golden Age ("Siglo de Oro") of Iberian Baroque art.
He painted mainly devotional pictures and liturgies of saints, and with the ascetic austerity of his pictures was very much in line with his mostly ecclesiastical patrons. Since religious people occupy a large space in his work, he is sometimes referred to as the "painter of the monks".
Francisco de Zurbarán's Life
Youth and Education
Francisco de Zurbarán was born on November 7, 1598, the youngest son of the merchant Luis de Zurbarán and his wife Isabel Márquez in Fuente de Cantos in Extremadura. There he was baptized on the same day in the church of Nuestra Señora de la Granada.
On November 14, 1599, the confirmation of Francisco de Zurbarán and his siblings María, Andrés, Agustín and Cristóbal took place in the same church. The Zurbarán family was prosperous: Luis de Zurbarán's business was successful, he owned several houses in the center of Fuente de Cantos and slaves.
Part of the family may have traveled to Peru from Seville in the mid-16th century, which could account for Francisco de Zurbarán's later contacts in America. His mother, Isabel Márquez, came from the family of a traveling merchant.
Francisco de Zurbarán never used his mother's surname, but signed various documents as Francisco de Zurbarán Salazar beginning in 1619. This could refer to a Basque or aristocratic origin, since noble Zurbarán and Salazar families had intermarried in Bilbao in the 16th century.
Francisco de Zurbarán received his first artistic training from a student of Luis de Morales, who came from the Extramadura. His father then sent him to Seville, the most important artistic center in Spain after Madrid, where he was to be trained as a painter.
On January 15, 1614, Zurbarán signed a contract there for a three-year apprenticeship in the workshop of the painter Pedro Díaz de Villanueva. No work by this artist, who was a painter of sacred representations, has survived. Zurbarán probably worked with his brother, Jerónimo Velázquez, who designed and produced altarpieces, several times during his career.
The apprenticeship in Seville was long considered by scholars to be less fruitful, but recent studies show that it was more multifaceted than assumed. Zurbarán met Francisco de Herrera the Elder and Juan de Ruela, important representatives of the naturalistic style in Seville, had contact with his contemporaries Diego Velázquez and Alonso Cano, and met the painter and important art theorist Francisco Pacheco.
In addition, Zurbarán probably learned sculpture, the colored setting of sculptures and the gilding of retables. Zurbarán completed his training in 1617.
Settlement as an artist in Llerena
Although he had not passed the examination required by the Seville painters' guild, Zurbarán settled as a painter of sacred motifs in Llerena, an important town in the Extramadura, in 1617. There, in the same year, at the age of 19, he married María Páez Jiménez, who was nine years his senior.
Zurbarán biographer María Caturla had classified the social status of the wife's family as low, while more recent research attests to their prestigious social position in Llerena. In addition, María Páez Jiménez belonged to the family of the Cardinal of Toledo, Juan Martínez Silíceo. This marriage produced three children: María, Juan and Isabel Paula.
The eldest daughter was confirmed on January 30, 1620, and the son was baptized on July 19 of the same year. The baptism of Zurbarán's second daughter took place on July 13, 1623, in the church of San Santiago in Llerena. That year his wife died, and her funeral was held on September 7. On April 15, 1624, Júan de Zurbarán was confirmed.
While relatively much is known about Zurbarán's family circumstances, there is little information about his artistic output in his early years. Apart from the design for a fountain for the main square of Llerena commissioned by the city council in 1618, only works now considered lost have survived in the documents.
In the following year, for example, he painted a canvas for the portal of the local church of Nuestra Señora de Villagarcia. On August 17, 1622, he received a commission for a reredos in the church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario in his native town of Fuente de Cantos, which was to show the 15 mysteries of the Rosary.
This retable was to include paintings as well as sculpture and gilding. Zurbarán commissioned an artist from Mérida for the sculptural tasks, with whom he shared the sum of 2250 reales. Zurbarán also made superstructures for a procession during Holy Week for the town of Fuente de Cantos. On August 10, 1624, Zurbarán was commissioned to make the sculpture of the Crucified for the convent of Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Azuaga, Badajoz.
Although the early work is unknown, it is considered certain that Zurbarán already maintained an important workshop at this time and must have enjoyed a high reputation in the region.
Three apprentices or assistants are attested in the sources for the time in Llerena: Manuel Rodríguez was a local painter, while Juan Gerrera, a relative of Zurbarán, and Diego Muñoz Naranjo, who accompanied Zurbarán's entire career, entered the workshop young and would follow the master to Seville in 1626.
Zurbarán married for the second time in 1625, the elderly widow Beatriz de Morales. She came from a wealthy family that had relatives in the colonies. In December of that year, Zurbarán settled in his wife's house in the Plaza Mayor in Llerena.
The quick marriage was dictated by the fact that both the care of the children and the assistants and apprentices in the painter's workshop were among the duties of the master's wife. The only daughter to come out of this marriage died in infancy.
First commissions in Seville
In 1626 Zurbarán's career shifted to Seville, although he remained a citizen of Llerena. This was favored, among other things, by the fact that Lorenzo de Cárdenas, IX. Count of Puebla del Maestre, who came from one of the most distinguished families of Llerena, held the office of asistente of Seville, which was roughly equivalent to the role of mayor. Zurbarán maintained contacts with this family throughout his career.
On January 17, 1626, Zurbarán signed a contract with Diego de Bordas, prior of the Dominican monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville, for 21 paintings: 14 were to depict scenes from the life of St. Dominic, four were to show the Doctors of the Church, and the last three were to show St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Dominic. The artist created this series in eight months for a fee of 4000 reales.
It marked Zurbarán's final breakthrough, as the paintings were extremely well received and subsequently almost all of the city's monasteries commissioned him. In 1627 Zurbarán painted the Crucified, also for this monastery, which was hung in the sacristy.
This is the first known signed and dated work by the artist. On August 29, 1628, on the occasion of the canonization of Peter Nolascus, Zurbarán was commissioned by the prior of the monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Merced Calzada in Seville, Juan de Herrera, to paint 22 paintings depicting episodes from the life of the founder of the order. The contract ran for a year and included a fee of 16,500 reales.
This represented a significant increase over the previous series of paintings and income similar to that received at the time by Francisco de Herrera the Elder. Since Zurbarán was still based in the Extramadura, where he maintained an important workshop, he and his assistants settled in the monastery for this commission.
He probably did not completely finish the series he had ordered, but compensated for this with a Saint Serapion for the Sala de Profundis, where the dead were laid out, and portraits of scholars for the monastery's library.
Four paintings for the church of the Fransican monastery of San Buenaventura were also created during this period, to complete a Buenaventura cycle commissioned from Herrera the Elder. More paintings were intended, but the reasons why it eventually became only four are not known.
Seville branch
On August 29, 1629, the Seville City Council presented Zurbarán with the request that he move his residence to the city to continue his activity. He complied with this request and settled near the cathedral with his family and assistants.
The following year, the painters of Seville, led by Alonso Cano, demanded that Zurbarán take the guild examination that was obligatory for the painters of the city. The latter rejected the demand and was able to avoid the exam due to his status as a successful artist, who also enjoyed the support of the city council.
Zurbarán signed his first contract as a resident of the city, in which he was also referred to as a "master painter," on September 26, 1629, which included the gilding and painting of an altarpiece dedicated to Joseph of Nazareth for the church of the Santísima Trinidad Calzada monastery in Seville.
In this he was a subcontractor to the painter Pedro Calderón and probably delegated most of the commission to his collaborators. The following decade was Zurbarán's creative peak, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
On the one hand, he produced large cycles of paintings for the domestic and American markets with his workshop, but on the other hand, he also created numerous works of his own.
In 1630, Zurbarán was commissioned by the city council to paint The Immaculate Conception, which was hung in the lower hall of the city hall. The following year he created The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas, which is the largest painting in Zurbarán's oeuvre and was intended for the reredos of the high altar of the church of the Dominican College of Santo Tomás.
As part of this commission, he collaborated with the altar builder Jerónimo Velázquez, the younger brother of his former master. In 1633 Zurbarán, with varying participation from his workshop, produced his only known group of apostles, which was recovered in the 19th century in the monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon.
The circumstances of the commission are unknown. Between 1631 and 1634 Zurbarán created numerous devotional paintings. For example, the first version of the Shroud of the Sweat of St. Veronica dates from 1631, a motif he revisited several times in the following years.
The same applies to the Agnus Dei, one of his most famous works, which was copied many times both by Zurbarán himself and in his workshop. Zurbarán's first still lifes, such as the Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, also date from this period.
Supraregional successes
Due to his successes in Seville and possibly also at the suggestion of Gaspar de Guzmán, Conde de Olivares, Zurbarán was invited to the Madrid court in 1634. There he received a commission for a series of paintings for the Hall of the Kingdoms (Salón de Reinos) in the Palacio Buen Retiro, which is now in the collection of the Museo del Prado, except for one loss.
This series includes ten paintings depicting the exploits of Heracles. These are the only known paintings with mythological motifs in Zurbarán's oeuvre. The royal commission was paid 1100 ducats.
After completing work on these paintings, Zurbarán quickly returned to Seville. Nevertheless, his stay at the court of Philip IV had an impact on Zurbarán's work, as he was able to study the king's Italian collection as well as come into contact with important painters of his era such as Diego Velázquez, Vicente Carducho, Juan Bautista del Maíno, Angelo Nardi, Eugenio Cajés and Antonio de Pereda.
These influences caused the artist's palette to become much brighter after his return, even though he largely retained his formal style.
The first trade contacts with the New World can also be proven for this period around the mid-1630s, and thus earlier than researchers had long assumed.
For example, there are court records from 1640 in which Zurbarán sued the captain Diego de Mirafuentes for damages because paintings intended for sale in Lima had been damaged on the crossing in 1636 and thus had become unsaleable.
Early trade contacts with the colonies, moreover, do not seem unlikely, given the family connections of both Zurbarán and his first two wives. The trial records also provide insight into the master's workshop, as assistants Ignacio de Ries, José Durán, Diego Muñoz Naranjo, and Alonso de Flores were listed as witnesses.
Due to the losses from this enterprise, Zurbarán had difficulty paying the high dowry of 2000 ducats at the wedding of his eldest daughter María in 1638.
On August 19, 1636, Zurbarán received a commission for a new altarpiece for the church of Nuestra Señora de la Granada in Llerena, which he created in renewed collaboration with Jerónimo Velázquez, taking on the painterly decoration.
Although this altarpiece was removed in the 17th century, two paintings from this commission remain in the church. Another commission for the artistic design of a high altar was given to Zurbarán on May 26, 1637, for the church of the monastery of La Encarnación in Arcos de la Frontera. The six paintings of this retable are lost.
In contrast, almost all the paintings of his two most important series have survived: in 1638 and 1639 Zurbarán created a series of paintings for the Charterhouse of Nuestra Señora de la Defensión in Jerez de la Frontera.
The paintings of this series, executed and dated by the artist himself, have been preserved but are in various museums. On March 2, 1639, Zurbarán signed a contract with Father Felipe de Alcalá for seven paintings for the sacristy of the monastery of Guadelupe in Cáceres.
This series of paintings is the only one by Zurbarán that is still in its place of destination. The painting The Mass of Father Cabañuelas, dated 1638, was probably delivered in advance as a work sample that would demonstrate Zurbarán's ability to work on a cycle without iconographic models, based solely on specifications from the monastery.
The delivery date for the remaining six paintings was August 15, 1639. Since these are large-format paintings that were also created at the same time as the commission for Jerez de la Frontera, it must be assumed that the workshop's assistants were involved, even though the works have been attributed to Zurbarán alone up to now.
On March 28, 1639, Zurbarán's second wife was buried in the church of La Magdalena in Seville. Conjectures that the artist wanted to enter a convent as a result of this loss are groundless. During this time Zurbarán cultivated his contacts with the court.
He sent his best gilders to Madrid and also participated in the decoration of the ship Rey San Fernado, which Philip IV received as a gift from the city of Seville.
Francisco de Zurbarán's Work in Seville
The narrative cycles of the 1630s were followed, from 1640, by sequences of images of religious founders, the apostles, and female saints. Between 1640 and 1650, the production of Zurbarán and his workshop multiplied. This was due to the many orders, among others for the American market.
For the colonies, between 1640 and 1645, Zurbarán produced the series of legendary fighters, the Infante of Lara, but also cycles of biblical patriarchs and Roman Caesars, for which he used engravings of various European origins as models.
In addition, he worked on subjects such as the Immaculate Conception, the Infant Christ, the Sweat Shroud of Veronica, and representations of St. Francis. Furthermore, Zurbarán also produced occasional still lifes that are considered masterpieces. However, it must be stated that he stagnated at a high level. For the years 1640 to 1655, hardly any dated or documented works have survived.
On February 7, 1644, Zurbarán married the wealthy young widow Leonor de Tordera. She came from a family of gold and silversmiths. Her brothers endowed her with a dowry of 27,700 reales, the same as that of her father on her first marriage to Diego de Sotomayor, who had perished in Puebla, Mexico. With the latter he had six children, who were baptized between 1645 and 1655 in the parish church of Sagrario.
Except for María, born in 1650, they may have died as infants. In 1645 Zurbarán and his wife moved into a rented house near Seville Cathedral, which was one of the old palace buildings of the Alcázar of Seville.
On May 22, 1647, he signed a contract with Captain Juan de Valverde that included ten scenes from the life of Mary and 24 paintings of virgins. These paintings, sent to the convent of La Encarnación in Lima, were remunerated with 2000 pesos, 16,000 reales.
All the paintings are now lost. Apart from selling paintings from his workshop, Zurbarán also traded in Flemish landscapes and painting materials, as evidenced by a shipment to Buenos Aires in 1649.
In addition to trade with the New World, Zurbarán had good relations with the local aristocracy and also with representatives of the high nobility, for whom he repeatedly carried out commissions. Nevertheless, Zurbarán's life in Seville became more difficult due to political and economic changes.
In addition, on June 8, 1649, Zurbarán's son Juan, who had assisted his father in the studio and was by then a talented artist in his own right, died during the great plague epidemic of Seville. On April 9, 1650, Zurbarán's daughter María Manuela was baptized.
She may have served as a model for some paintings depicting Mary with the Christ Child. Around 1650 Zurbarán worked on the reredos for the chapel of San Pedro in Seville Cathedral. The paintings from this commission have been preserved in their original place of installation.
Around 1655 Zurbarán painted three large paintings intended for the sacristy of the Charterhouse of Santa Maria de las Cuevas in Seville, which are now in the collection of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville. Overall, however, only a few signed works from this difficult period are known.
According to the Seville Cathedral parish register, the Zurbarán family lived in Calle Abades from 1656 to 1658. The deteriorating economic situation was probably also the reason for the move to Madrid.
Late work in Madrid
In May 1658 Zurbarán moved to the court in Madrid, where he painted mainly devotional pictures for noble patrons. This move was probably connected with the hope of being appointed Pintor de Cámara, court painter.
Various small-format, dated and signed paintings survive from this year, which were perhaps intended for recommendation among the new private clientele of buyers. During Diego Velázquez's entrance examination for the Order of Santiago, Zurbarán, together with Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Alonso Cano, and Juan Carreño de Miranda, gave testimony in the latter's favor on December 23, 1658.
Zurbarán continued to develop artistically in Madrid towards the end of his life. Although he did not follow the Baroque style of the court, which was influenced by Francisco de Herrera the Elder, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Francisco Rizi, he did take influences from Velázquez and from Italian painting.
He found an outlet for works in this style in Madrid. According to Palomino, Zurbarán also worked again for the king. In 1660, for example, he completed a decoration begun by Alonso Cano for the chapel of the Franciscan monastery of Santa María de Jesús in Alcalá de Henares, for which he created two large-scale paintings. With the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus and St. John, Zurbarán painted his last signed picture in 1662.
During this period, he had increasing financial problems resulting from his inability to collect outstanding debts from his commissions and exports. For example, he owed the Hieronymites rent of 8000 reales over three years. He was able to pay 2000 reales and offered the monks to create 20 paintings to their specifications if he could not pay the outstanding sum by the end of 1659.
In addition, his health was also increasingly deteriorating. On August 26, 1664, one day before his death, the painter wrote his will, in which he recorded his wish to be buried in the monastery de los Agustinos Recoletos Descalzos in Madrid. Zurbarán died in Madrid on August 27, 1664.
To finance the costs of illness and burial, his wife Leonor de Tordera pledged the family's silver. The will provides information about the artist's financial situation: he had no debts and possessions no different from those of his peers. Heirs were daughters from his first marriage, María and Isabel Paula.
Image themes
The painter's fame began with series of paintings in which visions and legends of religious were spread. In cyclical contexts are repeatedly also his full-figure figures of saints and religious, placed in steep vertical format. Occasionally he also paints direct portraits after life.
Depictions of St. Francis, mostly kneeling in meditative contemplation of a skull, he painted in over 50 versions since the 1630s. The male portraits are characterized by the monumental effect of the voluminously puffing robes, while the female saints are often draped in sumptuous fabrics, rendered with detail-obsessed precision. The portraits and figures of saints do without allegorical accessories.
The need of Spanish places of worship for Marian themes was unlimited in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Above all, the depiction of the Immaculata recurs in all periods of his work. Due to the theme, the painter had to deviate here from the otherwise preferred dark funds and set the floating Mother of God in front of delicate pink to golden glowing sky backgrounds populated by shadowy angels.
Important clients became the monasteries of the Carthusian order. He supplied the Virgin of the Protective Mantle and two other large paintings for the Charterhouse of Santa María de las Cuevas, the altarpiece (1633) and a cycle of paintings for the Charterhouse of Jerez (now in Cadiz and Grenoble).
Profane subjects such as the battle scenes and mythological subjects he painted for the king in 1634 remain an exception in his oeuvre.
Still life plays a special role in Zurbarán's oeuvre. It is true that only a few autonomous "bodegones" were painted by his own hand. (In his large workshop, his son Juan (1620-1649), who died at an early age, had rather devoted himself to this genre).
However, in various large interiors, distinctly still-life-like arranged and almost hyper-realistically painted details stand out. The same impression of closely seen materiality is made by the paintings of the sweat cloth of St. Veronica and the Lamb of God given quite realistically as a bound creature on the slaughter bench. In both series of motifs, the painter's ability for concentrated statement and the targeted use of his painterly means is evident.
The use of 16th and 17th century prints from Italy and the Netherlands (his estate contained a large collection of such engravings) has been used to explain the almost "Gothic" compositional style, reminiscent of Mannerism.
In the last years of his life, when the large commissions dwindled, the composition of his devotional pictures became more narrative, scenes from the Apocrypha and details from everyday life were added and thus accommodated the bourgeois taste for pictures (Infant Jesus with Crown of Thorns, The Sleeping Mary as a Young Girl, The Departure of the Holy Family from Egypt).
Development of style
His early works show his own "strong naturalistic" style, based on strong chiaroscuro effects (tenebrism). In this he was related to Caravaggio and Ribera. With sharp contours and hard shadows, he achieved strongly plastic effects that make his robed figures look like monumental sculptures.
Around the mid-1630s, he softened the extreme contrasts and also allowed for more even lighting and brighter colors. His figures, however, remain - for all their painterly delicacy, all the closeness to reality and elegance of the rendered textiles - rather of ponderous statuary.
The figures stand tall and motionless in the frame. As tangibly plastic as the voluminous robed figures are modeled, they display a three-dimensionality that finds no counterpart in the staging of space, for example, through staggered depth or dramatic movement. In this, Zurbarán differs from most of his Dutch and Italian contemporaries.
His and his son's sober still lifes, arrangements of fruits and spare blossoms that seem almost unreal in cold light, are strikingly sparse and ascetic compared to the lush ensembles of their Dutch contemporaries.
Landscapes rarely play a role in his paintings. Scenically enriched depictions, with the exception of his late work, are almost entirely limited to large-scale commissions such as the battle paintings and the Hercules cycle he created for Philip IV's Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid.
During this period his palette brightened further, perhaps under the influence of Italian paintings he encountered in King Philip's Picture Gallery. The preference of the art public also turned away from the serious conception and realistic painting style since the middle of the century. The future belonged to genre scenes with softer, "painterly" contours and vivid colors.
Zurbarán lacked, to compare him with other major figures of southern European Baroque painting, the drama of a Caravaggio (who nevertheless strongly, if indirectly, influenced him) or the courtly elegance of Velázquez, who was his peer. He was also far removed from the popular complaisance and sentimentality cultivated by Murillo in Seville, 20 years his junior.
Aftermath
No school of note followed Zurbarán. Only the pioneers of modernism rediscovered him. Diary notes by Eugène Delacroix attest to the great impression that the paintings kidnapped from Spain by Napoleon made on the pioneer of Impressionism. In 1838, a Galerie Espagnole was established in the Louvre. Among the 450 paintings were 80 by Zurbarán.
Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne and Salvador Dalí invoked him, Paula Modersohn-Becker drew in front of his paintings in the Louvre, and even the Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell, who built his Museo Vostell Malpartida near Zurbarán's birthplace in Extremadura, was deeply impressed by the Spaniard.