The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion

Francesco de Zurbarán is the most overlooked of the great masters. Outside of Spain he is barely known, and generally neglected.

Why is he so unheralded? Primarily, because he specialised in painting monks. In fact, virtually all his work was ecclesiastical, produced for monasteries and populated by clergy, saints, and other religious figures. His pictures simply don’t possess the overwhelming impact of masterpieces by the three Spanish titans, Velasquez, Goya, and El Greco.

His paintings’ dark mysticism was appealing during a time of the Catholic Church’s response to the grip of the rapidly emerging Protestantism of Northern Europe. For art, this led to rooting out the extravagancies of the baroque and mannerist traditions – paintings that were considered too much of the flesh, sensuality, nudity, lust, depicting obscure old testament fables rather than new testament truth.

In this environment, Zurbarán produced majestic depictions of monks in various postures of prayer and meditation, the details of their robes rendered exquisitely. His colour palette may have been a spare one, but the complexity and nuance he brought to such limited subject matter was startling. No other painter had ever captured the dour tones of the folds of cloth or hessian worn by his pious subjects more sublimely.

He would routinely live in the monasteries as he worked, better able to experience and understand the secular lives in each specific Order. Most of them observed long periods of silence intended to free the mind and soul to contemplate God.

Zurbarán’s realism and austere, spiritual aesthetic was well-suited for these quiet, thoughtful environments.

Born in 1598, the virtually self-taught Zurbarán emerged from artisan obscurity through a most helpful second marriage to a wealthy landowning widow. She introduced him to the civic leaders of Seville, then the fulcrum of Spanish wealth, patronage, and rapidly expanding communities of convents and monasteries. They would go on to provide Zurbarán with a continuous flow of commissions.

His paintings depicted his subjects with an overpowering sense of devotional intensity. In the Martyrdom of St Serapion from 1628, Zurbarán takes the grisly execution of Serapion and moves it to a transcendental reflection on the nature of death, conviction, and beatification. The background is darkened, the deep shadows creating dramatic contrast between light and shade, the figure bearing no hint of the violence to which it has been subjected.

Serapion was believed to have been crucified in an X shape, and then disembowelled and dismembered. He had been tortured to death after having stood in the place of a captured priest, but a delayed delivery of the required ransom proving fatal.

None of the horrific details are evident in this painting – Zurbarán instead chose to convey a still and calm portrait. The three-quarter-length figure of Serapion’s lifeless body fills the composition, emerging from the dark background robed in his pale beige habit. Illuminated by the candlelight of religious interiors, it allowed Zurburan’s figures to loom out of the flickering light, as if inhabiting the same space as the viewer.

His pose is reminiscent of Christ on the cross, and the fact that Serapion willingly risked his life echoes Christ’s own sacrifice. Zurbarán’s use of muted browns and cream colours add to the subdued tone of the work, pierced only by the small yet prominent red and yellow Mercedarian badge on the saint’s torso.

The painting was a fitting subject for the Mercedarian Order in Seville, who commissioned it for a room in which bodies were prepared for burial. Founded on the ideals of self-sacrifice, the order was responding to the suffering of religious believers during the wars between the Moors and Spanish.

Furthermore, a number of pirates were capturing ships and their passengers in the waters around Spain. Mercedarians took a cue from Serapion in offering themselves to take the place of devout Christians being held, in the unlikely hope that funds could eventually be raised to free them.

Zurbarán was also commissioned by the Carthusian Order to paint the martyr St. John Houghton, who was murdered in England by being hung, drawn, and quartered. In the painting, Zurbarán also omitted any grim details, instead showing the saint holding out his heart, as he is seen with a noose around his neck. Only his open habit is a reference to his body being cut open, and he remains unmarked except for a small bruise on his forehead, with no other obvious signs of trauma. 

When this work is compared with the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, by José de Ribera, another prominent artist of the time, we see that Ribera’s painting details the torturous peeling off of the saint’s skin, revealing his organs, muscles and tissues. In bypassing the appalling nature of such a death, and instead conveying an atmosphere of serenity, Zurbarán emphasises the eternal reward of heaven.

Rather strangely, some of the most significant of Zurbarán’s paintings are to be found in Auckland Castle in County Durham. Here, a series of twelve works bound for convents in South America were stolen in a pirate attack on a Spanish ship; the Tribes of Israel cycle ended up in this small British town.

Unfortunately, Zurbarán’s characteristic style was to fall out of favour later in his life. He had moved to Madrid in an unsuccessful quest for new work, and at the time of his death in 1664, he had become both virtually unknown and almost penniless.

Today, he is revered by a few contemporary painters, drawn to his use of earthy, understated colour to create deceptively simple works of electrifying power.