São Francisco de Assis

This is not Saint Francis as he lived. Zurbaran painted a stranger, later legend. In 1449, more than two centuries after the saint's death, Pope Nicholas the Fifth is said to have gone down into the crypt at Assisi and found the body still standing upright, incorrupt, as if paused in prayer. Working in Seville in 1659, Zurbaran shows that moment and nothing else. The figure stands in a coarse brown habit against near-total darkness, lit hard from one side, most of the face lost inside the raised hood. For a long time the picture hung under the name of another Spanish painter, Ribera, and only in 1847 was it recognised as Zurbaran's.