Posted: 29 Aug 2025 by PML
Zurbarán's painting is at once a masterly depiction of mundane items - a cup of water, a flower, piles of citrus fruit, a slightly worn table - and a piercing, hallucinatory vision of objects which have somehow become laden with a significance beyond the everyday.Unlike many other 17th century painters of still life arrangements containing flowers, fruit and other foods, he has avoided any sense that these are ephemeral: that they were alive and growing but have been gathered and brought indoors, where they will quickly age and rot - a vivid lesson on the transience of human life. Instead, Zurbarán's oranges and lemons have been translated, in a quite inexplicable way, into immortal fruit from the table of the gods, and his orange blossoms and rose are unwitherable flowers which might have crowned Aphrodite.
He was also a deeply Catholic painter, however, specializing in religious scenes and single figures of saints (often set in the same shallow space as the still life above, lacking recession and merging into a night-black ground, invested with a similar hyper-reality). Thus when he paints fruit, it is never actually pagan fruit from a mythological picnic of the gods, but a way of presenting the lives of Christ and the Virgin in a profound meditation on their meaning, and as a door opening to prayer. The lemons are an attribute of the Virgin, with their bitterness alluding to her grief at the death of her Son; the oranges are a variant on the apple, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and so represent the Fall of Man which Christ came to repair.
Zurbarán, A cup of water and a rose, c.1630, National Gallery, London, NG 6566
hytjytejy ejyejyjy5 j yejytejy te jytejytjyte
[1]'Natural plastics', 2005; quoted by Thomas Hainschwang and Laurence Leggio, 'The characterization of tortoiseshell and its imitations', Gems & gemology, vol. 42, no 1, p. 36