The only signed and dated still life by Zurbarán already hangs in the rooms of the Prado Museum for three months

The Prado Museum exhibits in room 10 A, until June 30, ‘Still life with citrons, oranges and rose’, the only signed and dated still life by Zurbarán, from the Norton Simon Museum. This piece will be in the company of other works by Zurbarán belonging to several different genres, and dated at various times in his career. For example, in that same room, in front of the still life, is the painting ‘Saint Francis of Paula’, recently acquired by the art gallery. In fact, it will be the first time that this painting of the saint made by Zurbarán will be exhibited to the public, since it was discovered in 1998 and had remained in a private collection until two years ago, when it went to the Prado and has been fine-tuned. for display. As the director of the art gallery, Miguel Falomir, has explained, loans from the Norton Museum are not very common – they opened their policy of transferring works relatively recently – and the agreement reached will also entail the loan of a work from the museum to this institution: the portrait of ‘Queen Mariana of Austria’ made by Velázquez. This loan will start in the fall and also for three months. The story of ‘Still Life with Citrons, Oranges and Rose’ is striking, since it has meant a change in the analysis not only of Zurbarán’s work, but also of the still life genre in Spain. The piece was discovered in the 1920s and purchased at an auction in Paris by an Italian patron. It would pass into the hands of the American Norton Simon in 1972. This businessman and philanthropist, who started the Norton Museum, acquired the still life as a gift for his wife at the time, the actress Jennifer Jones. Curiously, he was also the owner of another work by Zurbarán, ‘The Family of the Virgin’, in which you can see a plate with a cup similar to the one in the painting that now hangs in the Prado Museum. In ‘Still Life with Citrons, Oranges and Roses’, on a table, and in front of a dark background, there are a metal plate with several citrons, a basket with oranges with their leaves and orange blossoms and another metal plate on the resting a cup and a rose. Some of his elements, such as the cup with the rose, appear in other works by the painter, who throughout his career lavished still life details on his religious compositions. However, still lifes independent of him are very rare. THE STILL LIFE IN SPAIN, UNKNOWN “If this work had been discovered a hundred years later, it would have been studied in another, more fertile context for still life paintings in Spain,” explained the head of conservation of Spanish Painting until 1800 at the museum, Javier Portús, who also has questioned the “religious and sacred” character that was granted to this painting since its discovery. In this sense, he has pointed out that when this still life was known, there was no awareness of the “powerful tradition” in Spain in the cultivation of still life. It would be an exhibition in 1935, fifteen years later, that would give its place to Spanish still life paintings, bringing together nearly 200 pieces from private collections. Zurbarán was always known as a painter of friars and devotees, so it has been normal to frame him in this historiographic tradition. That is why many experts have chosen to interpret this still life as if “it were in the realm of the ineffable, the religious experience.” A RELIGIOUS PICTURE? “All the elements of the painting could be interpreted in a religious key in the Golden Age, from the lighting to the arrangement of the objects on the table – which could be an altar -. But I do not believe in this interpretation, although I do be a sublime work that approaches the mystery of the sacred,” added Portús. The extraordinary fame that this work has acquired since it was unveiled in the 1920s is due to Zurbarán’s masterful use of scale, its extraordinary descriptive precision, and its compositional values. The objects invade a good part of the pictorial surface, they are arranged in three slightly differentiated planes and a very selective lateral light pulls them out of the shadows and contributes to clearly defining their volumes and transmitting their textures.