聖フランチェスコ

This is not a portrait of Saint Francis alive. Zurbarán painted a legend: that in 1449, nearly 200 years after Francis died, his tomb at Assisi was opened and the body was found standing upright, uncorrupted, its face turned up toward heaven. That is the moment shown here, the saint on his feet in the dark, hooded in the coarse brown Franciscan habit, a skull held against his chest, one bare foot catching the light. Everything else drops away into near-total blackness, the sharp handling of light and shadow that Zurbarán made his own. He worked in Seville through the 1630s, supplying paintings to monasteries across the Catholic south of Spain.