Saint Serapion by Francisco de Zurbarán

Saint Serapion by Francisco de Zurbarán

Almost all white

Serapion hangs dead against a black background, his wrists bound to a beam above his head, his face turned to one shoulder. There is almost nothing else in the picture. The subject is the great white habit of the Mercedarian order falling from his arms in broad, heavy folds, and Zurbarán paints it so completely that the cloth becomes the drama. The violence of the martyrdom happens off the canvas; what remains is stillness, and white.

Who he was

Serapion was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century member of the Order of Mercy, founded to ransom Christians held captive in North Africa, whose members vowed to take the place of prisoners when money ran out. He was killed in Algiers. A small paper at the lower right, painted as if pinned to the canvas, gives his name.

Seville, 1628

Zurbarán painted it for the funerary chapel of the Mercedarian house in Seville, the year before the city formally invited him to settle there. It is one of the early pictures on which his reputation rests: austere, frontal, lit as if by a single window, with that particular ability to make cloth carry spiritual weight.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, and measures 120 by 103 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 3,600-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 24 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford · Wikidata Q3464088 · Wikimedia Commons