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The glories of Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings | Letters
Paul McGilchrist, Jean Wilson and Chris Keil on the Spanish artist’s haunting images • Charlotte Higgins’s appraisal of Francisco de Zurbarán is insightful and compelling ( Simply divine: the extraordinary supernatural visions of Francisco de Zurbarán, 30 April ). However, Zurbarán’s painting The Crucified Christ contains the same conundrum that haunts so many depictions of this scene. Whatever the style, however moving, whoever the artist and however painstaking the rendering, the crucified body rarely conveys the intolerable heaviness of a body hanging by a single nail in each hand and through the feet. Even those evocations that include a small platform beneath the feet mostly fail to show the excruciating slump of a body suspended in this way. It is not that suffering needs to be conveyed – this is often not the purpose of the artist’s rendering. The sheer heft of the body’s suspensi
Source brief
Paul McGilchrist, Jean Wilson and Chris Keil on the Spanish artist’s haunting images • Charlotte Higgins’s appraisal of Francisco de Zurbarán is insightful and compelling ( Simply divine: the extraordinary supernatural visions of Francisco de Zurbarán, 30 April ). However, Zurbarán’s painting The Crucified Christ contains the same conundrum that haunts so many depictions of this scene. Whatever the style, however moving, whoever the artist and however painstaking the rendering, the crucified body rarely conveys the intolerable heaviness of a body hanging by a single nail in each hand and through the feet. Even those evocations that include a small platform beneath the feet mostly fail to show the excruciating slump of a body suspended in this way. It is not that suffering needs to be conveyed – this is often not the purpose of the artist’s rendering. The sheer heft of the body’s suspensi
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- Published by source: 2026-05-08T15:46:28+00:00
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- The glories of Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings | LettersThe Guardian - 2026-05-08T15:46:28+00:00
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