Explosions in the Mind

You cannot but look at him. He cannot but look up. He commands your eyes, this life-size figure alone in the darkness: nothing could be starker or stronger. And yet, so his own eyes tell us, that strength of his is all from above. Its source is not to be found within the more than six-foot-high canvas worked in black, white, sienna, and umber. The Saint Francis of Assisi painted in 1636 by Francisco de Zurbarán is in this sense a kind of periscope on the divine. Your attention is drawn inward, only to be shuttled to a higher level. The painting offers a place to commit your heart to meditation.Spiritual exercises could equally begin with Agnus Dei (circa 1635–1640), a smaller, landscape-format canvas painted by Zurbarán at about the same time. The formula is similar, the titular “lamb of God” being its dazzling sole figure, but rather than stand, this yearling selected from Seville’s market stalls lies prone on a ledge, legs bound with cord, awaiting the slaughterman and the dark that gapes beyond. There is yet life in his eye, but that eye is turned contemplatively inward. God, taking on flesh, takes on the knowledge that flesh must suffer and die; the unseen and unpainted, in the...