The Archangel Gabriel

Zurbaran painted this around 1631 for the Dominican college of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Seville, in a Spain where the cult of angels ran strong and churches wanted them made vivid and close. So he did something very grounded. The archangel Gabriel, caught mid-step and gazing up toward heaven, seems to have been modelled on the costumed adolescents who marched in Seville's religious processions, in their rich, stiff robes. The result is an angel with real weight, heavy fabric catching the light against a dark ground. Gabriel is the messenger of the Annunciation, and in the original altarpiece he stood among other figures, a Saint Andrew among them, now scattered to other museums. The city of Montpellier bought the painting in 1852.