Christus sammelt seine Gewänder

Zurbaran made this in 1661, near the end of a career that had quietly collapsed. For years he had been the great painter of Seville's monasteries, but tastes moved to the softer manner of the younger Murillo, his commissions dried up, and he moved to Madrid in something close to poverty. He died three years after finishing it. The subject is a humble, painful moment: Christ, alone after the flagellation, stooping to gather up his fallen garments, the kind of quiet devotional image Zurbaran handled best, a single figure lit against deep darkness. The painting still hangs in a parish church at Jadraque, in the Guadalajara hills north of Madrid, rather than in a museum.