La Crucifixion du Christ

The Dominican friars of San Pablo el Real in Seville commissioned this from Zurbaran in 1626, when he was still young and largely unknown, and he delivered it in 1627. It was hung in a dim chapel and seen through a grille, in low light, and that is the key to how it works. The body of Christ is lit hard against a background of pure black, with nothing else in the picture, no landscape, no mourners, no sky. Visitors at the time reported that it looked less like a painting than a carved wooden sculpture standing in the dark. That was the point in Counter-Reformation Seville, an image meant to stop a worshipper and hold them in front of a single figure. The work so impressed the city that in 1629 its council formally asked Zurbaran to move to Seville for good.