Virgin of the Clouds

In 1619 the town council of Llerena, in Extremadura, ordered a canvas of the Virgin to stand over one of the gates in the town wall, the one called Villagarcia. The painter they hired was a local man of about 21 who had finished his apprenticeship in Seville only a couple of years earlier, and this is the earliest painting by Zurbaran that anyone has been able to identify. The figure is already solid and heavy in the way his later saints would be, while the face and the veil are handled with great delicacy. She stands with her arms crossed against grey and gold clouds, and the angel heads around her are barely blocked in, which is what a picture meant to be read from the street below could afford. It came off the wall long ago. The museum in Badajoz bought it in 1951 from the parish priest who was keeping it.