St. Anthony Abbot

In the Seville of the 1640s, Francisco de Zurbarán ran a busy workshop turning out saints for monasteries across Spain and for the churches of its colonies overseas. His specialty was the single holy figure, life-size, standing out of a dark ground with almost nothing around him. This is Saint Anthony Abbot, the Egyptian hermit of the 3rd and 4th centuries whom the Church counts as a father of monastic life, shown here as a bearded old man leaning on his staff. The plain darkness behind him is doing real work, pushing the desert solitude of his story toward anyone kneeling before it in a chapel. The way he turns and gestures to one side suggests the canvas once hung as part of a larger altarpiece, beside a central image it pointed toward.