The Crucifixion
Francisco de Zurbarán
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The Story
This small, painted crucifix is exceptional not only for its artistry, but also because it is signed by a woman artist: María Josefa Sánchez. Sánchez worked roughly from 1639 to 1649, probably in Castile, Spain, but little else is known about her. Women rarely worked as professional artists in seventeenth-century Spain, where laws and customs discouraged them from entering professions. Laws also prohibited women from serving as apprentices or signing official documents.
The few women who became artists usually trained in their fathers’ workshops. Some women artists of the period, Sánchez included, might have been nuns who produced devotional works within monastic communities. Sánchez depicted Jesus alive on the cross, an iconographic type known as Christus triumphans. His graceful pose contrasts with his agonized expression, and carefully rendered drops of blood spill from his hands and feet.
Executed in Oil on panel, measuring 63 × 39 cm (24 13/16 × 15 3/8 in.), the surface rewards close looking. María Josefa Sánchez builds the composition through layered glazes and a tightly controlled palette, letting cool shadows recede so that the warm, lit passages step forward.
Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. The composition slows the eye down at exactly the moment it would rather look away, which is the point.
Housed at Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the painting has passed through the hands of collectors, dealers, and institutions before reaching public view — a provenance that is itself part of the object's story.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
