Saint Luke as a painter, before Christ on the Cross

Saint Luke wrote one of the gospels, but painters claimed him as their own on the old belief that he had once painted the Virgin from life. Zurbarán shows him here late in his career, around 1650, as a working painter in seventeenth-century dress, palette in hand, looking up at the crucified Christ who glows almost like carved wood against the dark. Many have wondered whether the painter's face is Zurbarán's own, a quiet self-portrait at the foot of the cross, though scholars still argue about it. Christ hangs from four nails rather than the usual three, a way of showing the body that Dürer had introduced and that painters in Zurbarán's Seville, Velázquez among them, took up. By this date Seville's taste was already turning toward softer, sweeter painters, and his stark manner was slipping out of favour.