Francisco de Zurbarán by Ignacio Cano Rivero

Father Rallón describes the retable as having three stories (counting the attic), with Solomonic columns on the first story. Pemán also referred to a description of the altarpiece in a history of Jerez de la Frontera written about 1639–40 by the Hieronymite monk Estaban Rallón (Rallón 1926). The lateral sections of the architecture slanted slightly forward from the central section, like the wings of an open triptych (see the plan in Liedtke 1988, p. He determined that the altarpiece rose from a tall base through two stories and a large attic to a height of about fifteen meters (about forty-nine feet). The Reconstruction: Pemán (1950) was able to reconstruct major aspects of the retable’s design by studying traces of the construction on the walls and pavement of the choir. No visual record is known and the architectural elements are lost.

The retable was completed about 1640 and dismantled shortly after 1835. The ensemble also featured life-size sculptures of the twelve Apostles and a Christ on the Cross, in polychromed wood, by José de Arce (see fig. This canvas, five others of similar size, and six much smaller pictures adorned the monumental wooden retable ( retablo), or altarpiece ensemble, which filled the apse of the choir in the monastery’s church. The Battle between Christians and Muslims at El Sotillo was painted about 1637–39 as part of a grander project for the same monastery at Jerez. He specialized in paintings of male and female saints and in imaginary portraits of historical churchmen, such as the Museum’s Saint Benedict ( 1976.100.21), and a series of eight full-length pictures of celebrated monks (Museo de Cádiz) painted in 1638–39 for the Carthusian monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Defensión (Our Lady of the Defense), located just outside the small city of Jerez de la Frontera, about fifteen miles northeast of Cádiz. During the 1630s Zurbarán met the great demands of religious institutions (including some in Spain’s American colonies) by organizing a large and efficient workshop. This commission was promptly followed by similar projects the painter’s rapid rise in Seville was closely related to that of monastic institutions there, which increased in number from forty to nearly seventy during the first half of the century.

Zurbarán worked in Llerena, a market town north of Seville, between 16, but in 1626 he signed a contract with the Dominican monastery of San Pablo El Real in Seville, agreeing to supply twenty-one religious pictures within eight months.

His apprenticeship as a teenager in Seville coincided with that of Velázquez, who in 1623 went to Madrid as court painter. Francisco de Zurbarán was the leading painter of religious images in Seville from the late 1620s until the late 1650s, when he moved to Madrid.

Francisco de Zurbarán by Ignacio Cano Rivero