francisco de zurbaran -- 6/28/24

28 Jun 2024

francisco de zurbaran -- 6/28/24

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Today's selection -- from The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kathryn Calley Galitz. Zurbaran’s masterpiece, “The Battle Between Christians and Moors at El Sotillo" ca. 1637-39:

“This dramatic painting memorializes the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary in a battle that took place in 1370, during the Reconquista, in Jerez de la Frontera, near Cadiz, Spain; on the site of the Christians' victory, the Carthusian monastery of Nuestra Senora de la Defension was founded. The canvas, painted by Francisco de Zurbaran between 1637 and 1639, originally belonged to a multitiered ensemble of painting and sculpture made for the high altar of the monastery's church.

"Its composition evokes a seventeenth-century description of a lost fresco painted to commemorate the miracle, which depicted the Virgin ‘in the midst of a resplendent cloud, with the nobles of Jerez, armed and on horseback, their faces turned toward the thicket where the Moors were discovered.’ The foreground figure of a soldier, dramatically backlit, gestures toward the battle waging in the distance.

“The altarpiece was dismantled in the early nineteenth century, and Zurbaran's painting was acquired for the collection of King Louis-Philippe of France (ruled 1830-48), who displayed it in his celebrated Galerie Espagnole in the Palais du Louvre from 1838 to 1848.”