Saint James of the March

In 1462 a Franciscan preacher told a congregation in Brescia that the blood Christ shed in the Passion had been separated from his divinity during the three days in the tomb. A Dominican inquisitor called it heresy, the quarrel spread through Italy, and in 1464 the pope brought both sides to Rome, listened, and ordered them to stop arguing without ruling who was right. The preacher was James of the Marches, who died in 1476, and the museum reads this picture as a reference to that dispute, with the saint holding up a vessel. Zurbarán painted him in 1659 and 1660 for the chapel of San Diego in the Franciscan convent at Alcalá de Henares, one of four canvases for that chapel in a job shared with the painter and architect Alonso Cano. The figure stands nearly three metres high, which is the height of the wall it was made for. Zurbarán signed it in the lower right corner.