Word: zurbaran
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...Ribera had in his day, this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his work ever held in America, or for that matter in Europe (it was previously shown in Naples and Madrid). It rounds off the series of shows by Spanish artists of the 17th and 18th centuries -- Murillo, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Goya and now lo Spagnoletto, "the Little Spaniard," as Ribera was known to his Italian admirers -- designed to close gaping holes in our collective art-historical knowledge, and to make concrete sense of the pictorial achievements of what imperial Spain called its siglo de oro, its golden century...
When a composition with many figures worked for Zurbaran, it was almost always arranged in friezelike planes parallel to the picture surface, producing a solemn, stiff effect (sometimes hieratic, more often creakingly earnest), as in his paintings of St. Hugh and the Virgin of Mercy for the Carthusians at Las Cuevas. This was an archaic, almost Gothic patterning -- inside which his genius for simplified form could produce the most ravishing episodes of detail, as in the folds and loopings of the monks' white habits in The Virgin of Mercy. It is one of the things that commends Zurbaran to modernist...
Monks, it seems, are as subject to the tides of fashion as less holy men. Zurbaran's Caravaggian intensity started to drop out of favor after 1650. What the Spanish church wanted was the sweetness and emotional flexibility of Murillo, and Zurbaran had turned to producing devotional paintings by the score for the provincial market in Latin America. Some of the late madonnas in which he tried to rival Murillo's sentimental grace are sugary beyond belief, and the swarms of putti that infest them are among the ugliest in Spanish...
...feminine" late Zurbaran, with his fluid daylight effects and graceful, slightly stilted coloring, though less congenial to modern taste, was not by any means a painter to ignore. In any case, one now sees him whole for the first time, and the Met's show speaks with equal meaning to both experts and the general public. At a time when the rattle of turnstiles so often outvotes the voice of scholarship in American museums, such events unfortunately seem rarer than ever...
...work of 17th century Spain' s doctrinaire mystic Francisco de Zurbaran goes on magnificent display at the Metropolitan...