The Crucified Christ with a Donor

Look at the feet. Christ is fixed to the cross with four nails, his feet side by side on a small ledge, where three nails were the usual arrangement. In the Seville of Zurbarán's day that was an argued point. The painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco, Velázquez's father-in-law, who vetted religious images for the city's Inquisition, had been painting the four-nail crucifixion since 1611 and set out his reasons in a treatise printed in 1649. The painters of the city largely followed him. Zurbarán made this canvas in 1640. His Christ is already dead, heavier in build than in his other versions, lifted out of the darkness with his own shadow behind him, close to a carved altar figure. At the left edge, small, is the man who paid for it, in the dress of his own time, his hands joined. Zurbarán painted very few portraits, and this man's name has not come down to us. That corner of the canvas, his face and hands and the nailed feet above them, is worked far more finely than the rest.