Zurbarán

Selected Paintings 1625-1664

By Cees Nooteboom

1992

First Published

3.85

Average Rating

132

Number of Pages

4H01M

Audio Length

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) was one of the great Spanish painters of the Baroque period. Today, his idiosyncratic, very Catholic imagery fascinates us even as it has become alien and, in essence, inaccessible. In its aesthetic-religious dimension, his work—indebted to the Spanish mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—possesses a unique depth and rigor. Christ on the cross, dead martyrs and saints in reverie, meditating monks, the superiors of monastic orders that today have almost ceased to exist: In his mostly dark paintings, they are depicted so realistically, one feels one could reach out and touch them. And yet they also seem to be emissaries from another world. For Zurbarán, a contemporary of Velázquez and Murillo, painting and religious meditation were complementary aspects of spiritual observance. Perhaps it is precisely this quality in his art that makes his paintings the center of our interest today.

Avg Rating

3.85

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

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4 STARS

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3 STARS

23%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Cees Nooteboom

Author · 26 books

Cees Nooteboom (born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom, 31 July 1933, in the Hague) is a Dutch author. He has won the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the P.C. Hooft Award, the Pegasus Prize, the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prijs for Rituelen, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Constantijn Huygens Prize, and has frequently been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. His works include Rituelen (Rituals, 1980); Een lied van schijn en wezen (A Song of Truth and Semblance, 1981); Berlijnse notities (Berlin Notes, 1990); Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story, 1991); Allerzielen (All Souls' Day, 1998) and Paradijs verloren (Paradise Lost, 2004). (Het volgende verhaal won him the Aristeion Prize in 1993.) In 2005 he published "De slapende goden | Sueños y otras mentiras", with lithographs by Jürgen Partenheimer.