Christ at the Column

Zurbarán painted this near the end, around 1661, when his kind of art had gone out of fashion. For decades Seville had prized his severe, sculptural saints, but younger taste now ran to the softer, sweeter religious pictures of Murillo, and the aging painter had moved to Madrid with little work coming in. He died three years later, with little money. Here the whipped Christ glows pale against a near-black ground, a way of lighting figures that Spanish painters had taken from Caravaggio to make holiness feel physically present. The picture now hangs in the National Museum in Wrocław, in Poland.