The Holy Family

Zurbaran made his name in the 1630s with white-robed monks lit like carved stone against deep shadow, the hard tenebrist manner that suited Seville's monasteries. This Holy Family, from 1659, comes from the very end of his life, and the shadows have softened into a gentler, gleaming light. Mary nurses the child while Joseph leans in close, shown not as the usual grey-bearded old man but in vigorous middle age, a change the Counter-Reformation Church actively encouraged. By this point his commissions had thinned. The younger Murillo, sweeter and softer, had taken over Seville's market, and Zurbaran drifted with the taste of the times toward warmer light. He would move to Madrid looking for work and die there five years later, in some financial difficulty.