Christ the Saviour blessing

Zurbarán signed this one and dated it, in white paint in the bottom left corner, 1638. The image he was making was already old-fashioned by then. Christ raising his right hand in blessing while holding a globe topped by a cross had filled the opening pages of illustrated Bibles through the Middle Ages and into the 16th century, and it belongs to no scene in the gospels at all. This is the only painting by Zurbarán known to use it. His starting point was an engraving by the Wierix brothers of Antwerp, whose devotional prints circulated widely in Spain and sat in painters' workshops as models, and he made the globe and the cross larger than the print had them. Contemporaries would have caught something the picture no longer says out loud, that the position of the hands repeats the priest's gesture at the consecration in the Mass. The hands themselves are weathered and closely observed, while the face above them is pale and idealised, its features close to the cloths kept as relics of Christ's face in the cathedrals of Oviedo and Jaén.