Zurbarán joins the gallery of paintings at the Antequera Museum

The Antequera Museum (MVCA) has incorporated a painting by the Spanish Baroque painter Francisco Zurbarán (1598-1664). This monumental building in the city has expanded its extensive pictorial gallery, enriched by the 'Delgado Collection' which already includes works by Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, Murillo, and Goya. The piece in question is 'The Virgin with the Child Holding the Cross,' attributed to the painter in his final phase, as supported by Rafael Romero from the ICONO Restoration Studio and Ignacio Cano Rivero, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville.

This collection belongs to a family from Córdoba who, for a year now, has been lending first-rate paintings to the MVCA. In this case, it is a work from his last period when he was already in Madrid, which has been attributed after being acquired in Germany and restored upon its return to Spain. The attribution is based on a comparison with 'The Virgin with the Child,' displayed at an exhibition in Bilbao, which belongs to his last period as a painter.

It joins the museum in Antequera where the Cordoban family has been lending paintings by renowned artists for a year, enhancing the MVCA's local roster of Correa, Mohedano, Bocanegra, Fernández, or Toral. It was presented yesterday, Wednesday, by the city's mayor Manuel Barón, Deputy Mayor Ana Cebrián, MVCA director José Escalante, the representative of the Delgado family, Adriana Ferrín, and Rafael Romero.

Romero, from the ICONO Restoration Studio in Madrid, where the work has been restored and researched, highlights that this canvas "is one of the best examples of the painter's interesting period of activity in Madrid." It represents the latest phase of the painter's activity, "in which he adapts his painting techniques and materials to be in line with what was being done in the capital of the Court at that time."

He emphasizes the "unique sophistication in the way of making the blue cloak, using lapis lazuli as the main pigment, an exclusive blue pigment that top painters already used in Madrid at that time," completely different from what he had done throughout his life in Seville.

He displays a painting technique "of extreme sensitivity and atmospheric effects, both in the treatment of light and the use of color, in a work that, on the other hand, has been perfectly preserved."

The Delgado family shares that Ignacio Cano Rivero, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville and specialist in the painter Zurbarán, is the one who has published the first article on this attribution "previously unknown." It was when he "almost completely abandoned the production of pictorial cycles to dedicate himself to works of a more intimate and devotional character, smaller in format and mostly featuring the Holy Family or just The Virgin with the Child, as is the work presented here."

The work from the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, dated 1662, signed and dated just two years before his death, titled 'The Virgin with the Child and San Juanito,' is the reference for comparison and attribution.