Beschneidung

This tall canvas was never meant to be seen on its own. Around 1639 Zurbarán painted it as one storey of a huge altarpiece, roughly 15 metres high, for the Carthusian monastery at Jerez de la Frontera in the far south of Spain. It shows the circumcision of the infant Christ, a temple scene lit in the deep, plain way Zurbarán used for the silent monastic world he spent his career painting. The whole structure came apart in 1810, during the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars in Spain, and its dozen canvases were scattered. This one, together with an Adoration of the Magi, ended up in the museum at Grenoble in France, which is why two panels of an Andalusian altarpiece now hang far from the church they were built for.