Der heilige Franziskus in Meditation

Zurbarán signed and dated this on the little scrap of paper he painted at the lower right, his name, and the year 1639. Saint Francis kneels against a rock, his face almost swallowed by shadow, cradling a skull in his hands. In Counter-Reformation Spain a picture like this had a job to do. It was made to be knelt in front of, an aid to the kind of meditation on death that Spanish and Italian devotion prized in these years, when a worshipper was meant to hold the thought of their own mortality. Look at the habit: Zurbarán paints every patch and fray in the coarse brown cloth, a plain reminder of the vow of poverty. On the hands, faintly, are the stigmata, the wounds Francis was believed to have received in his own body.