From The Dark Heart Of Spain

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Metropolitan Museum of Art last week got its new season off to a magnificent start with the doctrinaire mystic of the Spanish Baroque, Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664). After Velasquez, El Greco and Ribera, Zurbaran was the best painter the so-called Golden Age of Spanish painting produced, but his work has never been seen in depth in America. Now, in one of those big transatlantic double acts the Met does so well, in cahoots with the Musee du Louvre in Paris, we have a show of 71 paintings organized by Jeannine Baticle of the Louvre. From this panoramic exposure a new Zurbaran emerges -- both stronger and weaker, more intense and yet more prone to hackwork, than one had imagined.

Our idea of Zurbaran, as the art historian Yves Bottineau points out in the catalog, was fixed more than a century ago by the Romantics. His paintings of cowled monks and saints in meditation seemed to connect with spectacular areas of Romantic fantasy -- the dungeon beneath the cloister, the Grand & Inquisitor's icy hand on the red-hot iron, and an obsession with trance, death and the link between faith and cruelty. This Zurbaran was more or less written into cultural existence by Theophile Gautier in 1840, on a visit to Seville:

Monks of Zurbaran, white-robed Carthusians who, in the shadows,

Pass silently over the stones of the dead,

Whispering Paters and Aves without end,

What crime do you expiate with such remorse?

What indeed? Zurbaran was an artist of unquestioning Roman Catholic faith, whose entire career was spent devoutly illustrating the most rigid and minute dogmas of the monastic orders he worked for (Dominicans, Franciscans, shod and barefoot Mercedarians, Trinitarians, Hieronymites, Carthusians, Carmelites). Yet in no small irony he became a favorite of French anticlericals two centuries and more after his death. Even the surrealists, who hated the church on principle, liked him. Indeed there are Zurbarans whose pure literalness might strike a modern eye as surrealistic; for example, his figure of the Sicilian martyr St. Agatha daintily bearing on a platter her breasts (which had been cut off by order of a wicked Roman prefect) looking like two pale pink, heavenly scoops of gelato.

But as a result, Zurbaran is known today by a tiny part of his output, maybe half a dozen "typical" paintings, single images of great power and reductive concentration: a Paschal lamb, the Agnus Dei, lying in darkness mutely trussed for sacrifice; or a row of clay vessels as dense and grand as architecture, ritually arranged as though on an altar. Perhaps the most remarkable of all, usually exhibited at the National Gallery in London, is the life-size kneeling figure of St. Francis in Meditation, painted at the height of Zurbaran's career, in the late 1630s. This is not the St. Francis of earlier legend, warbling to the birds of Assisi about Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Spanish Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries invented a new St. Francis, a death-haunted monk whose images would force the faithful to think about their own dissolution.

Zurbaran's version comes right from the rhetorical heart of the Counter- Reformation. Dark, admonitory and raw, it seems overwhelmingly real in every detail, from the coarse weave of the woolen habit (with a frayed hole at the elbow, emblematic of poverty, brilliantly accentuated with a few impasto flicks of white light on the dangling threads to give a hint of contrast to * the massive carving of the rest of the forms) to the shrouded face whose eyes Zurbaran loses in blackness to suggest the hermetic nature of the saint's vision. His gaping mouth is doubled in the gaping eye sockets of the skull he clutches. The eyeline is set low, so that the saint towers over you even as he kneels. The light snatches the forms out of an eroding darkness; the shadows suck them back in again.

It gathers up all the ecstatic and theatrical resources of Caravaggio's lighting and impacts them into one single figure. Zurbaran, living in Seville, never went to Italy and never saw an original Caravaggio in Spain, though he probably knew the copy of Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, which had been praised by his teacher in Seville, Francisco Pacheco. The crucified Peter who materializes upside down in a reddish visionary fog to the entranced St. Peter Nolasco in one of Zurbaran's weirder paintings -- an astonishing prophecy of late Dali as well as an echo of Caravaggio -- must have been inspired by that copy.

Better than anyone else's, Zurbaran's work embodies the paradox of what the Spanish Counter-Reformation expected in church painting: that extreme spirituality lay in extreme realism. "Sometimes you might find a good painting lacking beauty and delicacy," Pacheco wrote in his Art of Painting. "If it possesses, however, force . . . and seems round like a solid object and lifelike and deceives the eye as if it were coming out of the picture frame," the lack of those qualities was forgiven. The real image made Christ or a saint real, ready to speak to you from the wall.

What we read in Zurbaran as influences of El Greco's "spirituality" struck Pacheco as mannered and distracting. He did not mention his ex-pupil in his book. But Pacheco was a dry, insipid painter, and Zurbaran's slightly awkward fierceness must have been disturbing to a man whose chief pride lay in being the father-in-law of Velasquez. Zurbaran would not master the sense of secular decorum, the discreet and far-reaching rhetorical power of Velasquez's much greater art. He did not try to, since he was mainly painting for monks, not connoisseurs. He and Velasquez studied together and were born within a year of each other, but their characters as artists were utterly different; one was a grand chamberlain, the other a preacher and limner.

Velasquez makes Zurbaran look primitive. One senses this even in Zurbaran's most ambitious work, the immense altarpiece he did in 1638-40 for the ) Monastery of Nuestra Senora de la Defension in Jerez, the majority of whose surviving parts -- scattered long ago among museums in America, Spain, France and Scotland -- have been reunited for the first time, in the Met, for this show. Its most beautiful panels, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision, are crowded with relatively still figures and seem to come out of the old world of Titian and Veronese. But when it came to mobilizing figures in action in deep space, in the centerpiece of a battle between Christians and Moors, Zurbaran could only quote from Velasquez's Surrender of Breda without achieving anything like its seamless integration.

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 taste. But to Velasquez's circle it cannot have looked very sophisticated. For all his formal solidity, moreover, the perimeter of Zurbaran's space often seems as thin as tissue, ready to collapse under the pressure of revelation -- and sometimes it literally does, as when the back wall of the otherwise "normal" domestic scene of The Virgin and Christ in the House of Nazareth dissolves in clouds of fulgid light while the young Jesus, foreseeing his Passion, pricks his finger on a thorn.

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 art.

But the "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.