Stupendous beauty in the simplest of forms
This masterpiece by Francisco de Zurbarán is the only still life he signed and dated
To contemplate Francisco de Zurbarán’s 1633 painting “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (it hangs at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif.) is like having someone gently thwack the back of your knees with a baseball bat: You fall to your knees. It’s involuntary.
Still life didn’t exist as an independent genre until the 1590s. So it’s notable that within a few decades, the genre had reached this remarkable peak. What’s harder to get your head around — suggesting a wild aberration, or an immaculate conception — is that “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” is the only still life the Spanish Baroque artist ever signed and dated.
The French term for “still life”— nature morte (literally, “dead nature”) — is pungent. It conveys the genre’s essential premise — images of inanimate things — along with the nuance that its favored subjects (flowers, fruit, food) once lived. That the English translation so casually switches out “dead” for “life” shows how fuzzy the line can get.
Freshness, in a nature morte, is usually of the essence. And freshness is what we get in Zurbarán’s picture. Fresh, dimpled lemons. Blushing Seville oranges. Pink rose petals. And a tiara of orange blossoms emerging from a halo of green leaves, their forms curved like scimitars, weightless as Arabic calligraphy.
Sharp light from the left punches these items out from the penumbral table and background. The local colors — yellow tinged with green for the lemon; yellow tinged with pink for the oranges; and the flower’s very light pink — establish a color spell like a Bach partita: harmonious but in tumbling motion, full of sensuous yearning and at the same time pure, inviolate, replete.
Zurbarán wanted us to fall to our knees. It may be just a humble still life. But the painting is also like an altarpiece: Its clear, tripartite format — lemons, oranges, white cup with flowers — alludes to the Holy Trinity. The white cup was likely intended as an evocation of the Virgin Mary’s purity, while the rose without thorns summons up the Immaculate Conception.
The painter Judy Cotton recently described Zurbarán to me as a “master of darkness and quiet sensuality.” Exactly right. This still life, supercharged with sex, also trembles with mystical religiosity. Which makes it not just a Catholic picture, but also a profoundly Spanish one. An Andalusian picture.
You can say that a lemon is inanimate if you like. But eat its flesh, drink its sour juice, and it returns us to life — a simple notion that is primitively linked to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Catholicism is not the only form of spirituality to perceive that what we call “life” and “death” are states in promiscuous communion. Colors bleed; they spontaneously ignite. Blossoms and rind give off invisible scents. The Andalusian heat makes all of this bloom. Everything is interconnected. It is all stupendously beautiful.
Great Works, In Focus
Stupendous beauty in the simplest of forms
This masterpiece by Francisco de Zurbarán is the only still life he signed and dated
To contemplate Francisco de Zurbarán’s 1633 painting “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (it hangs at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif.) is like having someone gently thwack the back of your knees with a baseball bat: You fall to your knees. It’s involuntary.
Still life didn’t exist as an independent genre until the 1590s. So it’s notable that within a few decades, the genre had reached this remarkable peak. What’s harder to get your head around — suggesting a wild aberration, or an immaculate conception — is that “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” is the only still life the Spanish Baroque artist ever signed and dated.
The French term for “still life”— nature morte (literally, “dead nature”) — is pungent. It conveys the genre’s essential premise — images of inanimate things — along with the nuance that its favored subjects (flowers, fruit, food) once lived. That the English translation so casually switches out “dead” for “life” shows how fuzzy the line can get.
Freshness, in a nature morte, is usually of the essence. And freshness is what we get in Zurbarán’s picture. Fresh, dimpled lemons. Blushing Seville oranges. Pink rose petals. And a tiara of orange blossoms emerging from a halo of green leaves, their forms curved like scimitars, weightless as Arabic calligraphy.
Sharp light from the left punches these items out from the penumbral table and background. The local colors — yellow tinged with green for the lemon; yellow tinged with pink for the oranges; and the flower’s very light pink — establish a color spell like a Bach partita: harmonious but in tumbling motion, full of sensuous yearning and at the same time pure, inviolate, replete.
Zurbarán wanted us to fall to our knees. It may be just a humble still life. But the painting is also like an altarpiece: Its clear, tripartite format — lemons, oranges, white cup with flowers — alludes to the Holy Trinity. The white cup was likely intended as an evocation of the Virgin Mary’s purity, while the rose without thorns summons up the Immaculate Conception.
The painter Judy Cotton recently described Zurbarán to me as a “master of darkness and quiet sensuality.” Exactly right. This still life, supercharged with sex, also trembles with mystical religiosity. Which makes it not just a Catholic picture, but also a profoundly Spanish one. An Andalusian picture.
You can say that a lemon is inanimate if you like. But eat its flesh, drink its sour juice, and it returns us to life — a simple notion that is primitively linked to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Catholicism is not the only form of spirituality to perceive that what we call “life” and “death” are states in promiscuous communion. Colors bleed; they spontaneously ignite. Blossoms and rind give off invisible scents. The Andalusian heat makes all of this bloom. Everything is interconnected. It is all stupendously beautiful.