Francisco de Zurbarán. Santa Marina, hacia 1640-1650. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza en préstamo gratuito al Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga

Malaga,

It is known that the Protestant reform had as a reaction, in the Mediterranean countries, the splendor in the baroque period of a realistic and high dramatic load that sought to encourage devotion to its spectators through images of holiness with a clearly emotional background ; That was the context in which Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo and especially tragic.

Born in the last stages of the 16th century in Fuente de Cantos, he formed with the imagery painter Pedro Díaz de Villanueva in Seville and, in fact, his first known work is a Immaculate of 1616 that still offered deficiencies in technical, but also tenderness. Other relatively early works were San Bruno’s visit to Pope Urban IIwhere your interest in the virtuous collection of fabrics is already appreciated; The refectoryvery purified, in which the white canvas plays with the light in ivory tones of habits, and The Virgen de las Cuevasin which Guinard saw the candor of the virgins of medieval mercy.

After traveling to Granada, where he could know Sánchez Cotán’s painting, a feverish work stage began for him that he would continue in Seville and that he had among other fruits his saints, a very significant contribution to the baroque devotional iconography, especially in relation to relative To that female holiness: it represented serene and beautiful women who embodied models of virtue and faith and that led to the faithful to prayer and meditation more placidly than the canvases dedicated to penitent and anacoretas, more or less suffering and stark. In these compositions, as in the rest of his portraits, his naturalistic talent in the collection of the factions of the faces and in the textures of the clothing.

A selection of them can be seen in the Thyssen Malaga from today, starting with the Santa Marina of 1640-1650 that is part of their funds, striking for his peasant dress and the white gradation; These are pieces that offer a rich arc of iconographies, in relation to their lives and martyrdom About two canvas rods (170 cm), dressed in accordance with the fashion of its time or the previous century (to the old one), on dark funds – which universalize them – and carrying objects that have to do with their respective hagiographies or with devotion in a broader sense. Their faces, halfway between the generic and the individual, seem to challenge the viewer on the occasions when we do not see them abstracted in the prayer or in a properly mystical attitude, and the monumentality of their figures is accentuated in this exposure when we show them in row , forming a silent procession of saints not far away from the material context of those who contemplated them in the seventeenth century.

Francisco de Zurbarán. Santa Casilda, around 1630-1635. Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

They have arrived in Malaga eight canvases with this theme that guarded the hospital of the five sores in Seville and today has its museum of Fine Arts: they had these images with an obvious commercial success, and hence their multiple replicas even in others city ​​workshops; Among those who most often demanded were the care and religious establishments of Andalusia and America, especially in the mature time of Extremadura. The Santa Casilda of the Thyssen Madrid, dated in the first half of the 1630s and autograph, would be the source of many of those versions; As we said, in the face of the effects of the images that remembered the importance of atoneous sins, these fabrics, their embroidery and ornaments, they appeal to a more benevolent faith: they do not express them in a less realistic or moving way, but they did imply a more cozy character . As an iconographic origin of the representation of this saint, a Durero stamp has been studied, to which its usual referents were added: the textuals (the Golden legend from Santiago de la Vorágine or the Varia history of sanctas and illustres mugeres in every genre of virtues by Juan Pérez de Moya) and the carnals (real models for these women and their clothes, who have come to associate with the sculpture of the moment).

If we talk about Zurbaranesco realism, it is inevitable to refer to your aforementioned cloths, extolled by Palomino in the early 18th: So studious, that all the cloths made them as a mannequin, and the meats for the natural, and thus did wonderful things, following this means the Caravaggio school. His commitment to verismo was constant, although in his last years he was just nuanced by that tenebrismo, the chiaroscuros of Italian echo that contribute to the set scenography and drill.

Many of these pieces dedicated themselves to female instruction, favoring the possible identification of the faithful with earthly women anointed by grace; When they were commissioned by noble ladies, they demanded representations of the saint of their onomastics (and allusions to their virtues). In the end, that proximity to human desires could blur certain postulates of Trent if we seek literalness, but of course they achieve the coexistence of fleeting beauty and that associated with divinity, the contemporary and the eternal.

Francisco de Zurbarán. Santa Dorotea, around 1640-1650. Seville's Fine Arts Museum
Francisco de Zurbarán. Santa Matilde, around 1640-1650. Seville's Fine Arts Museum

“Zurbarán. SANTAS “

Carmen Thyssen Málaga Museum

C/ Company, 10

Malaga

From February 4 to April 20, 2025

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