Barcelona,
If in the Thyssen Malaga we can still contemplate a compendium of Santas de Zurbarán, in which the painter of Source of songs prompted the devotion presenting his virtuous models dressed in a splendid clothing of time, the first exhibition that the National Museum of Catalunya opens in this 2025, “Zurbarán (on) natural. Austera for the spiritual aspirations of his painting: he brings together, exceptionally, his three versions of San Francisco’s vision by Pope Nicolás V; One of them belongs to MNAC himself, the others come from the Musée Des Beaux Arts of Lyon and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
They constitute the axis of a tour of which other major works of the artist and works of contemporary authors in which the echo of a search for transcendence by roads that four centuries traveled the Extremadura is also part of the artist and works: through light, matter or geometry. Under the wake of Baroque naturalism and the caravaggist imprint, he painted Zurbarán, apart from his specifically religious theme compositions, what his eyes could examine and with remarkable precision, but in the current objects that populate their dead natures, it deployed dimensions that went beyond physics and that had to do with their willingness to apprehend the intangible.
Starting from the aforementioned San Francisco visionshis representations rather than refined from the episode, dated in 1557, in which Pope Nicholas V demanded to see the mummified body of the saint in his Basilica of Assisi -the narrative action is zurbar, so that we are only shown what the Pontiff subjectively contemplates: said mummy becoming a life of his own thanks to the light, the treatment of space and the volume Dialogues between the canvases of Zurbarán (this museu has five autographs and a workshop piece) and works by Alfons Borrell, Toni Catany, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Josep Guinovart, Antoni Full, Francisco Martínez, Aurèlia Muñoz, Marta Povo, Antoni Tàpies and Eulàlia Valldosera.
The portraits of the Blessed Heinrich seuse will come to meet us, San Francisco de Asís in Prayer and Santo Domingo de Guzmán readinglacking spaces and possessors of a patent spiritual force; The Holy Fazhe AGNUS DEI and the very mystical fabrics of the Immaculate and the Virgen de las MercedesArrivals of the Museum of Navarra, which suggest, from exuberance, the divine nature of the Virgin. Each of its figures affects that the created and the human body can be contemplated as the revelation of the supernatural, to become intermediaries of spiritual experiences by way of aesthetics.
The association of these works with the contemporary pieces of those authors, some already classic, would come to prove that, beyond techniques and formats, there are sensibilities and ways of looking that would not have been fully off; Artists who perceive a metaphysical aspect in everyday life. Next to the San Francisco visionswith both miraculous for implying the finding of a body that seems alive, and simplified in its complexity, we will see other abstract synthesis of material and mental spaces: those of Tàpies and Borrell; And next to his San Francisco in prayer Coming from the Prado, in full devotional exercise, the light developments of Guinovart, the revealing photographs of Light of Marta Povo or the drawings between the fragility and the esoteric of Antoni Full, raised from the iconographies of the same Zurbarán.
In the field of Bodegón, of which the Baroque artist was Major Master for his compositional rigor, the geometric gravity that applied to unequal elements and the modeling of objects, individualized, by the light, the pause and the silence of his own, he wanted to relate to the handling of light and distances by Hernández Pijuan and the beauty of the rotten fruits of Catany; and the Immaculate and their scenography, in whose cult they had a lot to do with the dissemination mediated by the paintings of Zurbarán and the city of Seville, are associated here with the symbolism given by Aurèlia Muñoz to the simplest objects and traditionally associated with women, including knotted tissues. They have reminded us of the painter’s will, something similar to a song to ephemeral glory: A cloth layer and two hats … an old -on -gifted color dress … two ordinary tablecloths … six towels …
Another happy meeting is that of the two versions of your Bodegón with potsin the funds of the Prado and MNAC Museum, for the first time since 1988. The emptiness and presence, silence and the noise evoked by the word potterymeet in these images, in which objects are ordered with the clarity and ability of synthesis that are typical of Zurbarán. They make up those volumes, lights and shadows, as in their saints figures, a complex language, at the service of the unbeatable from the material, and destined for the contemplation detained.
It should be noted that San Francisco’s vision that custody the MNAC has been recently restored: its background has been revealed, hidden under repainting; Its depth has been recovered, when the shadow of the saint and the upper arch of a fornicle has been appreciated more clearly, repeated in the other two versions; and also the volumetry of the figure, by becoming more evident the folds of its habit and hair of its face.
Suggestive in its approaches, this exposure proves that the mystery and the symbolism of light continue to question us.
“Natural Zurbarán”
National Museu D´Art de Catalunya. Mnac
Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc
Barcelona
From March 21 to June 29, 2025
