Francisco de Zurbarán - Agnus Dei

We both really enjoyed the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition which we saw together at The National Gallery in London this summer (it will move on to Paris later in the year and Chicago early next year). Its organisers deserve recognition for what is a really well-focused representation of the artist’s oeuvre with just over forty works on display, including a few by his son Juan, so unlike some of the worthy but overwhelming and exhausting blockbuster shows dedicated to other artists we’ve witnessed in different venues in recent years. This one benefits from some exquisitely selective loans from, amongst others, the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Highlights for us included the astonishingly impactful 1627 Crucifixion, the first of many of the subject Zurbarán would paint during his lifetime, but this one executed so early in his career. Nearby is the visionary and visually arresting The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, a compositional masterpiece. The hyper-realistic and allegorical Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose then brings an altogether more contemplative register to the show while the NG’s own Saint Francis in Meditation is a work we’ve admired on any number of our previous regular visits to the permanent collection and its inclusion here was a chance to marvel again at its radical conception and the meticulous detailing of the holy figure’s tattered robe. But near the end of the exhibition, you enter a room which includes a loan from the Prado that hits you between the eyes and it surprises you that the museum in Madrid would consent to release such an icon of Spanish art from its own collection, however temporary that may be (I wonder what reciprocal loans of equal magnitude they will have negotiated?). I refer to the heartbreaking Agnus Dei.

Francisco de Zurbarán, Agnus Dei, c 1635-40, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Both Zurbarán’s crucifixion paintings and this work are about sin atonement through sacrifice. According to the teachings of the church, Christ paid the debt of mankind’s sin when he was tortured and then nailed to the cross, his death and subsequent resurrection allowing for forgiveness and reconciliation and liberating us from the clutches of the devil. His self-sacrifice, it is said, allowed believers, if they chose, to exist in a loving relationship with God and ultimately to live a life eternal. In the gospel of St. John, the metaphorical descriptor of Jesus as ‘the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ is first used by John the Baptist. So, the lamb stands as a non-literal representation of Christ, or more particularly, it symbolises that aspect of Christ’s role that facilitated our redemption.

Lambs are famously meek and it is the idea of acquiescent acceptance of death that the Christ to lamb comparison suggests. But more than this, as in the origins of each of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, the ritual butchering of a sacrificial animal is presented in scripture as an offering to the Almighty, an inducement to mercy. Over the centuries, the figure of ‘the lamb of God or ‘Agnus Dei’ in Latin, has become central to Christian theology and practice and is referenced as a fundamental concept in its liturgical ritual. Images of it in Christian art have been numerous since the middle ages, one of the best-known being in van Eyck’s fifteenth century Ghent Altarpiece where it is presented with blood gushing from its chest.

But here, against a dramatically pitch-black background we see a still-living lamb lying on a table with its four legs tightly trussed together. Painted in trompe-l'œil realistic detail, the animal’s hooves appear to protrude from the picture plane into our own space. We feel its presence up close and personal. It is a picture of pitiful helplessness, and we can only imagine the terror that the lamb is experiencing - its doleful eye and open breathing mouth indicators of its apprehension of imminent slaughter. Has any artist ever displayed such profound empathy towards a condemned animal before or since?

We speak as vegetarians so perhaps we may be reading too much into this work. For Catholics like Zurbarán, the sacrifice was a necessary precursor to salvation. Are we giving this work too sentimental an appraisal, looking at through modern eyes routinely oblivious to such worshipful notions? I don’t think so. I think that the artist was alive both to religious doctrinal orthodoxy as well as a felt compassion towards a creature undeserving of its treatment. There may be tension between these two reactions, but they are not mutually exclusive.

The tenebrism in the composition emphasises the isolation and the misfortune of selection suffered by the herd-loving animal. It is as if it has been spotlighted for extermination and denied the survival that others in its flock enjoy. The extreme lighting contrast between the funeral background and the matted white fleece dramatically magnifies the poignancy of the lamb’s condition. The radiance of the illumination from above, and the deep shadow below the beast also deepens our sense of actuality, of the scene’s explicit sense of happening in this moment. This is partly due to the forensic detail that Zurbarán can explore under the acute glare, as if he is conducting a scientific examination. In this moment, and under that light, the truth of the hyper-naturalistic representation is made undeniable - the creature is alive, it is healthy, it merits admiration for its condition. At the same time, its deprivation of freedom, its present inability to frolic as it was accustomed to do as a young animal, is harrowing. This is a painting freighted with fearful anticipation. The moment of the animal’s hallowed luminosity will pass all too soon. It may be an anthropomorphic reaction, but we can’t help but be affected not just the certainty of the lamb’s imminent demise, its loss into the painting’s inescapable existential void, but by our own intimations of mortality.

We should remind ourselves however, that this is a work intended as an enjoinder to Catholic spiritual belief, and it is impossible that viewers in Zurbarán’s time would have seen it differently in a period that still saw inquisitional violence perpetrated in the pursuit of heresy eradication (and just as an aside, a Protestant would doubtless have seen the image as idolatrous). Faith might have been fervent but was often sustained through fear as much as conviction. So, this was not simply an anatomically precise depiction of a lamb; it was a piece of sacral art whose grievous meaning would have been widely understood as such. As a symbol of Christ, the lamb reminds us of his ultimate sacrifice. It is meant to solicit our sympathy, yes, but it is also a prompt, a commemoration of the price paid for redemption that urges us to remain true. The lamb is itself innocent, free from sin and so it should move us to lead more blameless lives ourselves. The painting thus had a deeply devotional purpose.

Symbols in art and literature are often powerful and resonant but fuzzy or ambiguous in their visionary conception, the looseness around their reality allowing them to encompass layers of meaning that are often conjured as much in the viewer or reader’s own subconscious minds as they are pinned down on the canvas or the page. Zurbarán’s lamb is quite different though. Its power lies in the minute particularity (look at its eyelash!), the literalism of its depiction, to the extent that we feel like we could plunge our hands into the soft wool on its back to feel its yield and warmth under our fingers. It is a mark of a great religious painting that the tenderness that this evokes in our hearts may just as easily be felt by believers and non-believers alike.