Zurbaran (National Gallery until August 23 2026): Perfection in a Piece of Cloth

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Martydom of St Serapion, 1628,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut

Francisco de Zurbaran is often described as a Spanish Caravaggio, and anyone familiar with his moodily gothic St Francis, part of the National Gallery's permanent collection, will probably understand the comparison. However, if you go to Trafalgar Square expecting high drama and cinematic emotion, you will be disappointed. Zurbaran is a quiet, thoughtful painter. He wants to wow you with a fold of drapery or a piece of fruit rather than a gruesome death or sexy vanitas. He is also defiantly Spanish, able to channel Murillo's oretty sentimentality as much as Velazquez realism. We are, I think, programmed to respond to the Italian Baroque with its grand gesture and heavy chiaroscuro and in-your-face gutsiness, but by the time you leave the Zurbaran show, you realise the strength of simplicity and silence.

I almost wish I had begun at the end. The room of still lifes, padded out though it is with works by Zurbaran's son Juan who died tragically young of the plague, explains Francisco's whole approach. Objects are given space and reverence: a white cup of water, a line of jars, a pile of lemons. There is precision, to be sure, in the beautifully rendered citrus skin and perfect pewter  reflections, but Zurbaran goes beyond draughtsmanship skill. He conveys the essence, the presence, the very soul of these everyday objects, so that they become emblems of God's creation. 

Rewind to the opening crucifixion and the same loving attention is given to the Christ's loincloth, so voluminous and complex that it defies the reality of the dying figure, to become the pure, flowing embodiment of living faith. It is difficult to tear your eyes away and look at the rest of the figure, sculptural against its almost black background. This is not Christ in agony. The feet rest almost comfortably on a horizontal shelf, the blood is a token trickle, the limbs have none of the contortion and strain you might expect, the face is impassive. Seville preferred such restraint in their painting, restricting high emotion to the lurid polychromatic sculptures which were paraded through the streets. 

There are a succession of such crucifixions, the best saved till last. The exhibition ends with an extraordinary, possibly unique, image of an artist at the foot of the cross. Perhaps it is St Luke, patron saint of painters, but it is impossible not to speculate that it is Zurbaran himself, producing his work, experiencing a vision. The figure is obviously a portrait, bald and gaunt, the artist has a monkish quality. The cross is off-centre, instead your gaze is drawn to the palette and brushes, the paint colours bright as beacons in the dark. Like the still lifes which have come before, it is an object imbued with extraordinary significance but in this case you can understand exactly what it means to the man who wielded it. 

Zurbaran is at his best when he gives his figures space. The exhibition has two of the twelve  Jacob and his Sons from the Bishops Palace at Bishop Auckland. Elaborately dressed, richly toned giants stride across undersized, tokenist landscapes, weighty in every sense. Even as a pair they have a sonorous ring, but I urge everyone to go to County Durham and see them in their full magnificence. St Casida wears a similarly elaborate costume more lightly, a Spanish lady out for a stroll, so that anyone ignorant of her story (food for Christian prisoners transformed into roses) might miss the religion altogether. 

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Young Virgin, 1632-3, Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is the big group set pieces which seem less assured. Figures interact awkwardly or not at all; spatial inconsistences and stagey backgrounds lead to an odd imbalance between observed precision and an overall lack of believability. Therein lies the problem: Zurbaran's art is driven by faith and if you do not share his (or his patrons') belief, the figures and the narratives they tell can seem at best clunky, at worst odd. It is difference between The Young Virgin and the same figure posed with her family.  The former, tiny and fragile yet old beyond her years, is surrounded by carefully chosen symbols in icon-like isolation, the latter is somehow diluted by the mundane details of her home. Zurbaran's iterations of the Immaculate Conception with their Murillo-esque heavenly palette and a proliferation of creepily disembodied cherub heads left me completely cold. And then there are the Labours of Hercules, a rougher, more muscular, almost Italianate Zurbaran, which, together with the truly extraordinary Colossal Head, suggest there was perhaps another artist trying to get out. 

What stays with you, however, is Zurbaran's utter conviction. Even if you cannot share his faith (and although we know nothing about his religious views I find it impossible to believe he could paint like this without a deep faith), you can appreciate his certainty. High drama becomes unnecessary when every piece of God's creation matters. St Serapion's tortured martydom is utterly gratuitous when you can meditate on the shadowy folds of a white habit. You don't need to show Christ in agony when you can produce perhaps the most poignant image in Western art. Zurbaran was not a Spanish Caravaggio: he was much much more.