Review: “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London

The last book by the late New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Death (2024), starts with a bang. When told he is dying of cancer, Schjeldahl has a unique reaction: he plans a trip to Madrid, just to spend more time in the Prado. After thinking about it for a while, it starts to make sense. There you will find a very rich collection of paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya and El Greco. It has to do with anyone who has a lot of fun in their life watching things, although personally, I wouldn’t bring Steve Martin on tour. You are very funny; it can be a distraction.

With “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London, you don’t need to go to Madrid to enjoy the works of this master. This exhibition represents the first major exhibition that the UK has ever given Zurbarán (1598-1664), and includes more than 40 paintings, taken from the Prado, the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Cleveland Museum, Norton Simon and gallery spaces. The exhibition combines work that began in Seville—at the time one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, its port directly involved in trade with the Americas—with a short, prestigious painting of Philip IV in Madrid.

The latter produced one of the strangest—we’d say “very different”—works on the show. Hercules and Cerberus (1634) arose from an invitation Zurbarán received to help decorate the Buen Retiro, Philip IV’s new palace in Madrid. This work was his only royal commission, his only classical title and his only significant encounter with a male nude. Among all the Spanish war scenes and pictures of the royal family, this painting feels raw. Every muscle of Hercules is on display as he drags the three-headed hellhound out of the dungeon by a rope, his staff at the ready—the job was to pull the beast alive, not kill it. And look how the smoky, deep blacks shot out and the fiery orange of the underground behind him. He took the strict, natural style of Caravaggio’s followers and made something direct and unusual. An outlier in the oeuvre, yet undoubtedly his. Even in the royal palace, this means a hard-working Hercules rather than a cocky one.

Fashion must be at the center of any exhibition these days, and there is a room at London’s National Gallery that acknowledges Zurbarán as Spain’s first fashion designer. Saint Casilda (c. 1635) would be a good example of this. Behind the possible theory, it looks like one of those over-detailed cakes from a television baking competition, a tower of silk, taffeta and brocade. Her dress is bright enough to be a tapestry, and the color is out. This was probably the custom of the time, when the preacher Bernardino de Villegas complained that such saints were so “dirtyly dressed” that they read less like images from heaven compared to “worldly women.” Maybe she was just jealous of her lovely red skirt.

Agnus Dei (1635-40) collects everything else in the room. You can lose yourself in the details of the work—the tangled and snowy wool of the lamb rendered realistic, but like a mountain, the shadows on its curved horns so subtle, is its face bathed in divine light?—that you may not even realize that this lamb is about to be slaughtered. Zurbarán looked at the square of life in the face, and saw in it all its beauty and appearance.

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