Zurbarán, Francisco de (1598-1664)
San Francisco en meditación (Saint Francis in Meditation)
1632
Oil on canvas, 114 x 78 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
In the iconography of St Francis of Assisi, which began shortly after his death in 1226, there was an early tendency to represent him as a thin man with prominent cheekbones and sunken cheeks, but it was especially after the Council of Trent that the image of the saint as a gaunt and emaciated ascetic became predominant. At the same time, narrative scenes gave way to those of ecstasy and visions, and representations of him meditating in the solitude of a cave became widespread. It was also preferred to dress him in the Capuchin habit, perhaps because the reformed Franciscan order, founded in 1525, was characterised by a stricter observance and more closely reflected the spirit of penitence favoured by the Council.
Within the abundant production of Zurbarán dedicated to the saint of Assisi, this work represents an early formulation of an iconographic type, Saint Francis meditating with a skull, which the painter from Extremadura took up again on successive occasions throughout his life. Both Martín Soria and María Luisa Caturla relate the treatment given to the theme by Zurbarán with his interest in the work of El Greco, to whom we owe the first representation of the theme in Saint Francis and Brother León meditating on death, which Zurbarán could have seen in Seville, directly or through engravings. In the Museum‘s work there is a greater dependence on the model established by El Greco than in later works, since the components derived from the Cretan painter become less and less noticeable in the successive versions.
It is a clear example of the most characteristic aspect of Zurbarán‘s painting: the representation of monks and saints in severe compositions, with monumental forms. The isolated figure of the kneeling saint occupies almost the entire height of the canvas and stands out against the dark background due to the light that falls on it. He wears a Capuchin habit of rough cloth, tied with a thick cord with a triple knot alluding to the Franciscan vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. The inclination of the body and the shadows created on the face by the hood increase the effect of concentration on the skull, of rotund volumetry. Its presence, reinforced by its location and by the light that produces shines on the frontal bone, recalls the brevity of life and the imminence of death, a favorite theme of reflection for Baroque devotion. The book appears with a similar objective, half supported on the rocks, almost tilting towards our space. The attitude of the saint, his isolation in the cave, the darkness that surrounds him, his half-hidden face and the objects that accompany him materialize the act of meditation before the eyes of the devotee, inciting him to this practice driven by counter-reformist religiosity. The austerity of the approach is accompanied by a restricted palette, in which ochres dominate for the figure, the skull and the book, in contrast with the grey and greenish tones of the background and the rocks.
The treatment of light, the interest in the careful representation of objects, the use of close-ups, are resources that could come from the ideas of the Italian Caravaggio (1571-1610), spread by his followers. They justify the words of Antonio Palomino, for whom Zurbarán was “[…] so fond [of Caravaggio] that whoever sees his works, not knowing who they are, will not hesitate to attribute them to Caravaggio”. The treatment of the skull and the book recalls one of the distinctive features of his work – the careful representation of objects – which is evident in his still lifes, perhaps the most exquisite of 17th century Spanish painting.
Among the members of the so-called “generation of the great masters”, that is, the painters born around 1590 and 1610, Zurbarán was a very personal follower of the naturalist-Caravaggist line that dominated Spanish painting in the first half of the 17th century. The painting in the Museum is located within this current that defined his work until the beginning of the 1640s. Given the date of its execution, it must have been painted in Seville, where he had been invited to settle in 1629 in recognition of the mastery demonstrated in the groups he painted for the Franciscan convent of San Pablo el Real and for that of La Merced Calzada. In the initial years of his stay in Seville, in addition to painting for convents and schools, he painted smaller paintings for private chapels or oratories. Taking into account the relatively modest dimensions of this example, as well as its formal and iconographic characteristics, it could be postulated as a hypothesis that it corresponds to this type of private commission. It was produced at a time when Zurbarán was in full possession of his expressive means, as shown by the large canvases he executed for the Jesuits, Visión del beato Alonso Rodríguez (Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid) and for the Dominican College of Santo Tomás, Apoteosis de Santo Tomás de Aquino (Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville). In 1634 he was called upon to take part in the decoration of the Salón de los Reinos in the new palace of Philip IV, the Buen Retiro, and he became directly acquainted with the Neapolitan and Bolognese Italian models. From then on, and more markedly during the 1640s, he tempered his tenebrism and evolved towards a more delicate and colourful painting, following the new trends that emerged in Spanish painting towards the mid-17th century, in line with changes in religious sensibility, which moved away from the severity of the Counter-Reformation towards a devotion of greater emotional commitment. (María Cristina Serventi | MNBA)