São Lourenço

Francisco de Zurbaran was the leading painter of Seville in the 1630s, known for a stark, quiet realism that suited the severe religious mood of Counter-Reformation Spain. He signed this Saint Lawrence in 1636. Lawrence was a deacon of the early Roman church, martyred, so the story goes, by being roasted alive on a gridiron, and Zurbaran gives him that very gridiron to carry, held almost casually like a tool. He wears the rich red dalmatic of a deacon, embroidered with a small figure of Saint Paul. Behind him lie the broken columns of a pagan temple. Zurbaran models the heavy folds of cloth in plain, even light against a dark ground. The painting has been in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg since the 19th century.