Saint Blaise

In the 1630s Seville was the richest city in Spain, the one port through which the wealth of the Americas passed, and Zurbarán ran a busy workshop turning out saints for its churches and convents. This tall, narrow canvas of Saint Blaise was almost certainly never meant to stand alone. Its shape tells you it was one figure in a row, set into the frame of a large altarpiece among other holy men. Blaise was a bishop in Armenia who, the story goes, was tortured with the iron combs used to card wool, which made him the patron of wool-workers, and because he once saved a boy choking on a fish bone, of anyone with an ailing throat. Zurbarán gives him the heavy robes and grave stillness he brought to all his saints, lit as if a single candle picked him out of a dark room.