The Holiness of the Material – Zurbarán at the National Gallery, until 23 August

Zurburan’s Agnus Dei (1635-40, The Prado Museum)

It is a small painting, no bigger than a school atlas. A young lamb lies bound on a stone ledge, its legs neatly tied, its eyes half-open, its woolly flank catching a single shaft of light against an absolute black. There is nothing else: no halo, no angel, no titulus, no flicker of allegorical gesture. And yet anyone who knew the words of the Mass – Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi – would immediately have understood that Francisco de Zurbarán was seeking to make reference to Christ, the sacrificial lamb, slain for the world.

St Luke as a painter before the cross (1660, The Prado Museum – currently on display at the National Gallery)

This is one of the most striking works in the first major UK monographic exhibition devoted to Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). Of the great seventeenth-century Spanish triumvirate – Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán – the last is the least known to British audiences and chiefly through the fine collection at Bishop Auckland Castle, purchased by the bishop of Durham in 1756. Born in Extremadura, Zurbarán made his career in Seville in its golden age, where the convents and monasteries paid him handsomely to paint visions, ecstasies, saints and the founders and members of their orders. Some fifty canvases have been gathered now from the Prado, the Louvre, Chicago and elsewhere, which are presented in darkened rooms to heighten the drama of his work.

Zurbarán’s saints are not picturesque. They stand life-size against blackness, in linen or wool or cloth-of-gold, and have an arresting sculptural quality, with the fabric of their clothing and jewellery exquisitely captured. Saint Margaret of Antioch – a National Gallery favourite – holds her shepherd’s crook with the unbothered poise of a Seville debutante. Saint Casilda crosses the room in a brocaded gown the colour of stained glass. Saint Francis kneels with a skull, his cowl tunnelled in shadow, and the cowl is given as much theological weight as the skull. This is the Zurbarán signature: the holiness invested in the material, in the dignity of the wood, and visible as much in his still lifes as in his portraiture.

Indeed, the Counter-Reformation in Spain, fighting on every front against an iconoclasm that would have stripped its altars bare, doubled down on the conviction that matter can carry glory and Zurburán paints the world as sacred; fleece, linen, wicker, citrus peel, embroidery – all of it lifted by sheer attention into prayer. Stand in front of his Cup of Water and a Rose – no saint in it, no halo, and only a pewter cup on a ledge – and you find you are looking at an icon of the Annunciation: the rose for Mary, the cup for what she is about to bear.

It helps to remember that he was working in the great age of Spanish mysticism – Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross were not long gone- and his paintings carry the same austere conviction that God is found in stillness and the long contemplative gaze. Certainly, many of the paintings merit time and attention – not easy in what is clearly proving to be a popular exhibition with ladies from the Home Counties volubly expressing their disgust with Catholicism (at least when I went…).

Note before you leave in the final room a small crucifixion with a painter standing at the foot of the cross. It is speculated that this might be Zurburán himself but has at times been identified as our own St Luke. It’s a fitting way to end an exhibition in which painting is presented as its own form of prayer and devotion.

The exhibition runs until 23 August.

Fr Daniel