{"id":174388,"date":"2026-07-08T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174388"},"modified":"2026-07-07T15:46:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T19:46:28","slug":"clearly-fake-zurbarans-uncanny-realism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/07\/08\/clearly-fake-zurbarans-uncanny-realism\/","title":{"rendered":"Clearly Fake: Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s Uncanny Realism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, Hercules and Cerberus,<\/em> 1634, oil on canvas, 132 cm x 151 cm. \u00a9\u00a0Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.<\/p><\/div>\n

The TikTok in question, posted by Donald Trump last summer, shows Barack Obama being wrestled to the floor, handcuffed, and held in a jail cell. The camera moves, or \u201cmoves,\u201d too smoothly, and everything has a melted-plastic glow that screams AI-generated, at least for the time being. The first few bars of \u201cY.M.C.A.\u201d are playing. So, yes: when the <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/i>published an article about videos like this and deemed them <\/span>clearly fake<\/span><\/i>, it was stating what anybody with functioning eyeballs already knew. Then again, if the comment section is any guide, there appear to be sentient American adults who think the forty-fourth president is currently in prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lately I\u2019ve wondered why people believe things, or if they really do. Often it appears they can\u2019t remember whether they do or not. <\/span>Nobody seems to know why this is the case, except that the internet is involved somehow, or MAGA<\/small>, or wokeness, or AI. I had been thinking about the usual explanations, and getting tired of them, the same week I went to the National Gallery in London to look at the paintings of Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n. <\/span>This turned out to be less of a digression than I\u2019m making it sound.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Zurbar\u00e1n<\/em>, which runs in London through August before traveling to Paris and Chicago, celebrates a star of what must be the world\u2019s longest, boldest, most successful PR campaign: the one waged by the Catholic Church to make its book more believable. No offense intended; it\u2019s just a matter of art-historical fact that for centuries Europe\u2019s most promising young picture makers were schooled in perspective and modeling and then sent out to bring the Bible to life. Only a few decades before Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s birth in 1598, the Council of Trent had doubled down on art as a tool of religious education. Paintings, per the council\u2019s 1563 decree on sacred images, should be tastefully bare, never \u201cadorned with a beauty exciting to lust.\u201d Crowd scenes had to be policed for unsavory characters and gaudy objects, or else the picture\u2019s lesson in piety could be \u201cperverted into revellings and drunkenness.\u201d But if done right, art would help teach Christendom to be Christian.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, The Crucifixion,<\/em> 1627, oil on canvas, 290.3 \u00d7 165.5 cm. Robert A. Waller Memorial Fund, \u00a9 the Art Institute of Chicago.<\/p><\/div>\n

By the late 1620s, Zurbar\u00e1n had become the leading religious painter of Seville, the richest city in Spain. Saint Francis was one of his favorite subjects. The Lamb of God, trussed and haloed, was another. His compositions were somber and shadowy enough to please all but the nitpickiest Tridentine councilman. <\/span>In a 1627 Crucifixion<\/span><\/i>, his breakthrough work, the play of light and darkness on naked skin is mapped almost pore by pore\u2014Zurbar\u00e1n is sometimes called the Spanish Caravaggio, but here he makes his Italian elder look like a Zurbar\u00e1n wannabe. Christ\u2019s loincloth has more liveliness than other artists get from his whole body; the fabric around the holy crotch looks as intricately squinched as a brain, a flesh covering that is plenty fleshy in its own right. But the details don\u2019t show off too much, never forget that their deepest purpose is to report. This is exactly the way things happened, the painting assures us. We can trust it.<\/span><\/p>\n

By many accounts, Sevillians did. As legend has it, some of the first people to see this <\/span>Crucifixion<\/span><\/i> assumed they were looking at a sculpture, and so far some reviews of the National Gallery exhibition have printed the legend as a settled fact. I\u2019m not necessarily saying that it\u2019s false\u2014only that these kinds of perfect, spit-take anecdotes turn up suspiciously often whenever there is a revolution in visual technology. The tale of moviegoers running from <\/span>Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat<\/span><\/i> in 1896 has been debunked more times than that of the Loch Ness Monster, but a hundred and thirty years later, we\u2019re still smirking. It\u2019s a neat way of scolding our ancestors for their gullibility and complimenting ourselves for being harder to fool. In a century or two, I have to assume, people will talk about how my generation once ran screaming from those early deepfakes of Bill Hader becoming Arnold Schwarzenegger.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n,\u00a0The Vision of Alonso Rodriguez<\/span><\/em>, 1630, oil on canvas, 262 cm x 162 cm, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

By now, you may have noticed the paradox. Zurbar\u00e1n makes paintings that are at once exquisitely lifelike and completely implausible. He has time to hunker down with the little details because he neglects everything else. There is no crowd of onlookers in that 1627 <\/span>Crucifixion<\/span><\/i>. There isn\u2019t even sky or ground or a horizon line; the Cross, hovering in blackness, is depicted with a realism that doubles as a trippy, zero-gravity surrealism (Dal\u00ed was a fan). Three years later, for <\/span>The Vision of Alonso Rodriguez<\/span><\/i>, Zurbar\u00e1n painted Christ and Mary squirting jets of light out of the pink, plasticky hearts in their fists; that each of them is also sitting on a pile of baby heads seems comparatively humdrum. The avant-garde has been trying for the past century and a half to match the calm insanity of Baroque religious art and still hasn\u2019t succeeded. A surrealist painting says, Here is a strange scene\u2014enjoy. A Zurbar\u00e1n insists, Here is a strange scene\u2014believe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the people in these images seem afraid to obey. In <\/span>Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco<\/span><\/i> (1629), the living, breathing Peter kneels before the crucified Peter, who hangs upside down in brownish murk. To the extent that this is a work about faith, it\u2019s also one about paranoia: Breathing Peter reaches out as if to confirm he\u2019s not hallucinating. Yet the presence of Upside-Down Peter inches away from his hands isn\u2019t even the most perplexing part of his vision. Ask yourself: Where <\/span>is <\/span><\/i>Upside-Down Peter? He\u2019s on a cross, obviously, but depending on where your eyes land, the wooden beams could be half embedded in solid rock or huddled in a cave or floating in fog. Things get less, not more, coherent the longer you stare\u2014while I was trying to make sense of the space, I noticed that Upside-Down Peter\u2019s right arm is a few inches shorter than his left, unless it\u2019s actually longer and tilting off into the distant dark.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, The Apparition of St Peter to St Peter\u202fNolasco<\/em>, 1629, oil on canvas, 179 x 223 cm. \u00a9\u00a0Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.<\/p><\/div>\n

The blunt way to put it is that when he\u2019s not pulling off sublime feats of realism, Zurbar\u00e1n can be spectacularly clumsy. Nobody is better at layering the shadows around a body or a bowl of fruit, but as soon as he moves on to deeper planes, the old master becomes a novice. Some of his backgrounds have a strong resemblance to nineties green screens\u2014the far-away ships in <\/span>The Defense of Cadiz Against the English<\/span><\/i> (1634\u20131635), for one, might as well be wallpaper. When he occasionally tries to overcompensate for shallowness, he makes the background <\/span>too<\/span><\/i> far from the fore and stretches the figures trapped in between like prisoners on the rack: painting <\/span>Hercules and Cretan Bull <\/span><\/i>in 1634, he extended the hero\u2019s right leg so far into the middle distance that a good gust of air could tip him over.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, Hercules and the Cretan Bull<\/em>, 1634, 133 x 152 cm. \u00a9 Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyone this talented must have known depth wasn\u2019t his forte, which would explain why, in so much of Zurbar\u00e1n, the only background is a thick, forgiving black. Good artists are always finding these kinds of shortcuts, and the great ones figure out how to turn their weaknesses inside out. Well aware that he wasn\u2019t a colorist on the level of Matisse, Picasso built <\/span>Guernica<\/span><\/i> out of bleak grays that proved to be the painting\u2019s greatest strength. I\u2019m not the first person to compare the two Spaniards: Picasso experts from John Richardson to William Rubin have interpreted Zurbar\u00e1n as an ur-Cubist, an eccentric handler of perspective whose gawkiness may or may not have been wholly intentional but looks modern either way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Exhibit A for Zurbar\u00e1n-as-Picasso will always be <\/span>Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth<\/span><\/i>, which he finished around 1640, when there was no painter in Seville more in demand. As with most Zurbar\u00e1ns from this period, the canvas is largely black, so that it seems at once flat and cavernously deep. A tearful Mary looks on while the young Jesus pricks his finger on the crown of thorns portending his death. It might be the most vivid thing Zurbar\u00e1n ever painted, but there are no stories of people mistaking it for sculpture. Everything is slightly, teasingly off; each fruit and book and vessel appears to have been observed from a different vantage point, so that viewers could almost be looking down and across at the same time. A table casts a shadow at one angle; the bowl in the corner casts one at another; Christ casts no shadow at all, and so on. It really is like a Cubist still life, with the obvious, pedantic difference that Zurbar\u00e1n isn\u2019t out to glorify the flatness of the picture plane. He is out to glorify Christ.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth<\/em>, about 1640, oil on canvas, 165 x 218 cm. \u00a9 The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.<\/p><\/div>\n

So far, have I been conflating the belief in the three-dimensional reality of these paintings with the belief in Christianity? Absolutely. So does <\/span>Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth<\/span><\/i>. (So do all of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s religious paintings, but this one especially.) You buy into its strange evocations of space the same way you\u2019re asked to buy into its lessons about Christianity. Let Mary be your guide: she knows her son is destined for greatness. She has been told he will grow up to be a king, and that his destiny will \u201cpierce [her] own soul,\u201d in much the way the thorn has just pierced his finger. Mary has been given a kind of picture of the future: a few glimpses of information with ample darkness in between. These fragments never cohere into a perfect, panoramic view, but she trusts them anyway. If she could see everything, she might not.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve arrived at another paradox, the big one: somehow, the spatial awkwardness of Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s paintings intensifies their power as tools of religious persuasion. This isn\u2019t a case of art looking better in hindsight\u2014in its own day, <\/span>Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth<\/span><\/i> was copied by ten painters (and these are just the ones historians know about). It was a hit. There may have been more realistic paintings in Seville at the time\u2014but maybe perfect realism isn\u2019t enough,<\/span> doesn\u2019t dig its hooks into viewers and pull them in. It is hard to name a first-rate Zurbar\u00e1n without this faint wrongness, even something as innocent as a still life. At a glance, you\u2019re looking at a quartet of vessels in a row; two glances, and you realize that the master of shadows has declined to paint them. If you think of Zurbar\u00e1n as a crafty magician who tricked his viewers into confusing painting with sculpture, this might look like an embarrassing misstep. Though the real magic, you could also say, is to misstep with a purpose and convince people anyway. I\u2019ve been wondering about belief, but I\u2019m not sure I know what the word means.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Zurbar\u00e1n may have been born four hundred years before anyone used the term, but I left the National Gallery thinking about the uncanny valley. When animators refer to it, they mean the sworn enemy of believability: any image falling into the zone just shy of realism has failed to persuade viewers to suspend their disbelief. We demand perfect lifelikeness and won\u2019t settle for a pixel less. Zurbar\u00e1n makes me suspect this isn\u2019t just slightly but rather exactly wrong\u2014that in fact belief takes place <\/span>only <\/span><\/i>in the uncanny valley. Perfect plausibility washes off too easily. People are less rational than they\u2019d like to pretend, which is why all truly haunting images, like all truly powerful ideologies, like all truly magnetic leaders good and bad, share a slight, nagging offness. They don\u2019t add up; they go 90 percent of the way toward making sense and command the believer to take care of the rest.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean to make Zurbar\u00e1n sound too much like a psychologist or a politician. I only want him to sound like what he was: a demonically talented artist who spent much of his life trying to inspire great surges of conviction, and who must have had thoughts about the job, not all of them positive. Because I love him most when he\u2019s feeling self-aware, I was happy to see the exhibition conclude with <\/span>Veil of Veronica<\/span><\/i>, completed in 1658. It wasn\u2019t a happy time. He was on to his third marriage\u2014his second and favorite wife having died in 1639\u2014and a plague had killed off half the population of Seville, including his son Juan. Murillo, his younger, gaudier rival, had replaced him as Spain\u2019s hottest religious painter. The same year, Zurbar\u00e1n left Seville and never returned. Six more years and he was dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

The Veil of Veronica<\/em>, 1658, oil on canvas, 105 \u00d7 83.5 cm. \u00a9 Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, Spain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Like his other variations on the subject, this late <\/span>Veil of Veronica<\/span><\/i> consists of a cloth with a head on it. Per the legend, Veronica wiped Christ\u2019s sweaty cheeks and later found a perfect photocopy of his face floating in the fabric. Zurbar\u00e1n typically painted a detailed Savior, but in this case he gave us a blur: reddish hair, an ear, something like a nose. The face, if you could call it one, doesn\u2019t have eyes\u2014a nasty punishment for an artist to inflict on one of his figures, though this is roughly what the genuine article looks like (assuming there\u2019s anything genuine about the smudgy relic held in the Vatican). You could interpret the painting as a private grumble, courtesy of a man who\u2019d devoted his life to realism and still ended up on the margins. Or else this was Zurbar\u00e1n, in the dusk of his life, grasping something that his peers had missed about the veil of Veronica\u2014Veronica, who in 1898 was voted the patron saint of photographers, which also makes her the unofficial saint of deepfakes, fake news, Fox News, Claude, and all the insanities they\u2019ve encouraged without actually creating. There is almost a face, and this is what keeps us squinting into the cloth. Our eyes make it real.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jackson Arn is a writer whose work has appeared in<\/em> The New Yorker, the<\/em> New York Times, The Drift, and various other places. His first novel,<\/em> In the Velvet Garage, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe blunt way to put it is that when he\u2019s not pulling off sublime feats of realism, Zurbar\u00e1n can be spectacularly clumsy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2700,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68389],"tags":[6215,25889,68889,68891,19381,67827,68888,52378,68890,215,27198],"class_list":["post-174388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-painting","tag-catholicism","tag-christ","tag-council-of-trent","tag-deepfakes","tag-donald-trump","tag-featured","tag-francisco-de-zurbaran","tag-oil-painting","tag-seville","tag-spain","tag-the-national-gallery"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nClearly Fake: Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s Uncanny Realism by Jackson Arn<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 8, 2026 \u2013 \u201cThe blunt way to put it is that when he\u2019s not pulling off sublime feats 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