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Zurbaran: Celebrating the Glory of God
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14080 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
2,008 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Real piety, like happiness, is difficult to achieve, and often seems a mere illusion. That is one reason why it is so closely connected with the arts, and why the sacred is so hard to capture and portray convincingly. The works of old masters that aim at its portrayal have special handicaps in today's public arena, over and beyond the historical dilution and splintering of religious sentiment. The Western world is afflicted by a virulent strain of mystagogic vulgarity, which on the one hand cheapens the figure of Christ into a show-biz superstar and on the other replaces the calm center of genuine faith with a noisy and commercially organized fanaticism. Piety is dragged further into disrepute by certain Catholics and Protestants, clerical and lay, who exploit a neo-Pelagian heresy to dabble in the simplistic politics of so-called "liberation."
The Weave of Faith
One consequence of all this is that the content of much religious art is obscured or weakened, especially art from earlier times, when the weave of faith and non-Sabbath life was much tighter than it is now. This is not to say that these works have become totally meaningless or insipid. If most of them are now deprived of the hieratic context that gave them their original life and force, we still have ways of imbuing them with another sort of numen, or at least a certain awe-inspiring quality. After they have been removed from cathedrals, churches, chapels, or the houses or religious orders, many have been placed in a different class of shrine, called an Art Gallery, which endows them with the quasi-sacred, if secular, glow of genius. And, through the consecrating magic of the auction room, these works have also been absorbed root and branch into a religion of great strength and power, which has its own impressing temples, known as banks. It thus seems quite natural that an important Spanish bank, the Banco de Bilbao, should have sponsored a major exhibition of one of Spain's great religious painters, Francisco de Zurbaran, first at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and this month at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris.
But those with a taste for this seventeenth-century master are in luck. Whatever the sponsorship of this show, Zurbaran has not yet been drowned in the torrent of fashionable and hysterical greed that forces even the greatest paintings into mere forms of investment, no longer wonders to enjoy, but products for buying and selling. Though Phillip IV of Spain is supposed to have called him "painter of the king, and king of painters," Zurbaran was never an internationally modish court artist and royal portraitist like his
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