Saint Clara was the founder of the Order of Clarice. When she died, one of the nuns was a vision represented in the picture, while the other monks who surrounded the dying did not notice anything supernatural. The inscription below describes the scene: Christ and Mary, surrounded by crowned virgins in white robes, appeared to receive the soul of Saint Clara.
Realism and religiosity – these are the two poles between which the Spanish painting of the 17th century was developing. To convey reality to perceptibility precisely, to achieve the greatest “proximity to reality” and in depicting visions, to make religious paintings convincing due to clarity, this was the main aspiration of Spanish art.
Thus, Murillo’s “The Death of Saint Clara” is the key to understanding Spanish originality, since the two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, separated but correlated with each other, are the subject of the image. Similarly, Zurbaran is also “realistic” in the “vision” of the “Prayer of St. Bonaventure”.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)