Francisco Zurbarán

This volume offers the most comprehensive overview in print--and the first substantial English-language monograph in decades--on the great 17th-century Spanish painter Zurbarán. It spans his entire career, from his earliest commissions to key works from his mature period, plus works recently rediscovered over the past few years.
A contemporary of Velázquez, Zurbarán developed an austere vision that combined exacting realism with a palpable mysticism. Though he was sometimes known as "the Spanish Caravaggio" for his harsh use of chiaroscuro, Zurbarán's particular achievement was his creation of a more austere quietism, and a less foreboding if more melancholy atmosphere--qualities which lent themselves ideally to such genres as still lifes and his portraits of monks and martyrs, and which also ensured his importance for early modernism (especially Cubism).
Examining this beloved painter's oeuvre across six themed sections, Zurbarán: A New Perspective includes work by a selection of his most talented pupils, and by his son Juan de Zurbarán, also a superb still-life painter.
Francisco Zurbarán (1598-1664) is closely associated with the city of Seville, where he served his apprenticeship, and where his most famous painting, the ca. 1631 "Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas," now resides, at the Seville Museum. Zurbarán served as court painter to Philip IV, who is said to have revered him as "painter to the king, king of painters."

Starker than Velázquez and more ascetic than El Greco, Francisco Zurbarán (1598-1664) is easily among the finest of seventeenth-century Spanish painters. Apprenticed in Seville, he quickly gravitated toward the use of chiaroscuro, possibly having seen paintings by Caravaggio there: he was later to become known as “the Spanish Caravaggio.” But Zurbarán’s temperament, as it is realized in his painting, appears more melancholy, and therefore less foreboding, than Caravaggio’s, and his religious subjects are almost exclusively Christian. He developed a characteristic image repertoire around monasticism and martyrs and made a speciality of the Carthusians, whose white robes he took evident pleasure in depicting. His best-known work may be his 1631 “Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” now housed in the Seville Museum. It was around this time that Zurbarán’s star reached its peak, as he was appointed court painter to Philip IV. Later, toward the end of his life, Zurbarán’s harsh chiaroscuro style fell from favor, but his reputation was restored in the twentieth century, in part through the concerns of Cubism and its attraction to precedents for an emphatic plasticity. In this monograph, illustrated with 114 color plates, Santiago Alcolea, a scholar of seventeenth-century Spanish art and the author of previous books on Velázquez and El Greco, provides us with an overview of Zurbarán’s artistic career, dividing it into four stylistic phases and reproposing his relevance for our times.