San Andrés

Zurbarán painted this Saint Andrew in Seville in the 1630s, at the height of his career, when the city was the booming gateway to Spain's American colonies. He gives the apostle the solid, everyday body of a working man, a fisherman from Galilee, standing against a heavy overcast sky and leaning on the rough X-shaped cross on which, by tradition, he was martyred. The light falls hard from one side and leaves the rest in deep brown shadow, the plain, severe realism that Spanish patrons wanted for a figure meant to be prayed to. Zurbarán's workshop turned out many such single, life-size saints for monasteries at home, and shipped others across the Atlantic to the new churches of colonial Peru and Mexico.