Emerging from the darkness in his homespun robe, his mouth open in ecstasy, the Saint Francis of Assisi by Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664) fascinates, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. Does the visitor know that this figure represents a dead person, appearing alive? The artist painted the vision that Pope Nicholas V would have had, in 1449, at the basilica of Assisi, while opening the tomb of Poverello.
The pontiff would have discovered the saint standing, his eyes open, his flesh pink, fresh blood flowing from a stigma on his foot. A miraculous apparition that Zurbaran reactivates with his sculptural, life-size figure, whose cast shadow is silhouetted in the chiaroscuro of an alcove. “It’s the art of torture (…)but what a cry of love stifled by anguish springs from this canvas! “, s’enthousiasmera Huysmans.
An illusionist and stripped-down art
This masterpiece, formerly owned by the Franciscan sisters of Colinettes in La Croix-Rousse, was acquired in 1807 by the Lyon Museum. Ludmila Virassamynaïken, curator of ancient paintings and sculptures, is devoting a remarkable exhibition to him which brings together around a hundred works including a dozen paintings by Zurbaran, shedding light on the genesis of this creation and its still fruitful posterity.
The master’s stripped-down compositions speak to our modern taste. From the first room, theLamb with tied legs radiates, with its fleece brushed in woolly touches, on a cold stone which evokes the altar of sacrifice. Next to it, a procession of pots removed on an ebony background confirms Zurbaran’s talent for rendering the shine of a pewter dish, the glazed white of a jug. Same art of trompe l’oeil in this Veronica’s veil, as if suspended by two threads and a pin, in front of the stunned visitor.
A signature found
In this Spanish Golden Age, the Catholic Reformation relied on the power of such images, as on the cult of saints, for the edification of the faithful. The Franciscan order, dominant in Europe, gave rise to a proliferation of effigies of its founder, as an ascetic or penitent. Zurbaran, who has the same first name as the saint, will represent him, with his assistants, at least fifty times.
In this painting from the Saint-Louis Museum, the religious figure, lost in the contemplation of a skull, stands like a flame in the night. In this other, even more striking, from the National Gallery in London, a divine spotlight touches the hooded face of the Poverello, kneeling in prayer. And to think that this jewel adorned, from 1838 to 1848, the “Spanish gallery” of Louis-Philippe at the Louvre, contributing to the spectacular rediscovery of Zurbaran in France, then represented by 81 paintings! Upon the abdication of the sovereign, the Second Republic, good girl, will let him take his collection into exile, which will end up dispersed at auction in London…
An ever-living source of inspiration
At the heart of the Lyon exhibition, the confrontation of Saint Francis of Assisi of the museum with two other versions preserved in Barcelona and Boston offers another highlight. Restored thanks to the Friends of the museum, the first revealed a signature of the artist and a date, “1636”. Which could make it the main painting of the series, if we rely on the fervor of the face and the remarkable texture of the dress. The painter would have been inspired by a polychrome wooden sculpture of the same “mummified” saint, created around 1620 for a convent in Valladolid. And will, in return, give rise to other Saint Francis sculpted, impressive with their glass eyes and their ivory or bone teeth.
In the 19th century, the monks of Zurbaran – often copied – nourished mystical representations, such as these portraits of Sar Péladan, founder of the order of the Rose-Croix, by Zacharie Astruc or Alexandre Séon. In 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, Javier Bueno remembered it to depict the poignant Execution of a Spanish peasant. Loaned by the Galliera Museum in Paris, models by Madame Grès, Cristobal Balenciaga and Azzedine Alaïa also borrow from the geometric designs of the tenebrist painter. Contemporary artists are not left out, who, from Djamel Tatah to Owen Kydd, take up his hooded silhouettes, their gaze now riveted to the ground, in a loss of transcendence.
Photographing the Saint Francis from Lyon, Éric Poitevin replays, as if in a bath of developer, the miracle of this apparition. Alternately underexposed or overexposed, her large prints make her emerge from the shadows here, and disappear into too much light there. An ultra-sensitive tribute.
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Zurbaran, reinventing a masterpiece at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, exhibition including The Cross is a partner, until March 2. Price: €12, €7, free – 18 years old.
The catalogof the exhibitionunder the direction of Ludmila Virassamynaïken, with texts by specialists Odile Delenda, Javier Portus Perez, Maria Cruz by Carlos Varona (El Viso, 336 p., €38).
Haute Couture, de Florence Delay, a beautiful essay on the correspondences between the richly dressed saints of Zurbaran and the creations of the designer Balenciaga (Gallimard, 104 p., €12.50).
