You cannot but look at him. He cannot but look up. He commands your eyes, this life-size figure alone in the darkness: nothing could be starker or stronger. And yet, so his own eyes tell us, that strength of his is all from above. Its source is not to be found within the more than six-foot-high canvas worked in black, white, sienna, and umber. The Saint Francis of Assisi painted in 1636 by Francisco de Zurbarán is in this sense a kind of periscope on the divine. Your attention is drawn inward, only to be shuttled to a higher level. The painting offers a place to commit your heart to meditation.

Spiritual exercises could equally begin with Agnus Dei (circa 1635–1640), a smaller, landscape-format canvas painted by Zurbarán at about the same time. The formula is similar, the titular “lamb of God” being its dazzling sole figure, but rather than stand, this yearling selected from Seville’s market stalls lies prone on a ledge, legs bound with cord, awaiting the slaughterman and the dark that gapes beyond. There is yet life in his eye, but that eye is turned contemplatively inward. God, taking on flesh, takes on the knowledge that flesh must suffer and die; the unseen and unpainted, in the case of this visual metaphor, is the future we all face.

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.

For the windowpane in George Herbert’s “The Elixir”—composed just a few years before these paintings, with a like religious urgency—read Saint Francis’s habit and the fleece of that lamb. Beyond those surfaces lies meaning: meaning’s origin, indeed. At the same time, we do stay our eyes. Never was oil paint worked to such sackcloth-stiff, such wool-like effect. The survey of Zurbarán’s art currently at London’s National Gallery presents many such marvels of palpable texture. We could rest content with savoring the unerring aim of this painter’s brush, combined with his flair for lighting.

If we do so, are we thwarting Zurbarán’s purposes? Museum viewing encourages comparisons. What, for instance, distinguishes the work of this luminary of Spanish “Golden Age” painting from that of his Sevillian friend and near contemporary Diego Velázquez? How does the manner of the twenty-eight-year-old Zurbarán (a Crucifixion, his earliest canvas here, dates from 1627) develop across the decades until his death in 1664? The museum broadens the view, but the museum displaces. The Saint Francis was probably painted for a convent of high-class nuns in Madrid, whereas the existence of several autograph versions of Agnus Dei suggests that the image won the hearts of successive private clients. For those viewers, the pictures would likely have been conduits for contemplation in isolation. To see them brought together with some four dozen other pieces, the majority being likewise tall canvases with religious subjects, is a forceful experience. Forceful partly because it tugs two ways: at so many turns of the path, you are invited to stop walking onward and in imagination to kneel.

Does it help, then, to describe the main stock-in-trade of the Zurbarán studio as “sacred art”? The term might posit something timeless and traditional. But that 1627 Crucifixion startled Seville because it was distinctly a novelty. Viewers rubbed their eyes, hardly able to believe that its Jesus—again, life-size and brilliant against blackness—was not three-dimensional. One form of art familiar to this urban audience would have been the polychromed wooden crucifixes that Juan Martínez Montañés had carved over the previous two decades. Meanwhile, across that period, the chiaroscuro that Caravaggio had introduced in Rome had become a lingua franca for European painters. The fusion of these models, however, proved—and still remains—spectacular.

The arriver on the city scene, from an Extremaduran market town, was a showman equipped with matchless tonal control and, equally, with an instinct to startle: witness a two-figure canvas delivered to a Sevillian monastery in 1629, showing the order’s beatified founder being granted a vision of his namesake’s crucifixion. In this Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, Christ’s first vicar dangles head downward, gaunt and near naked, on his cross—an inverse martyrdom, by his request, since to die as Jesus died would be to presume too much—with his eyes fixed on the thirteenth-century Iberian champion of the faith. The crucified Peter has crashed down onto the canvas amid a shockwave of scumbled sienna; the monastic Peter, spreading his arms to receive this daunting gift from God, kneels in a formless darkness; both the old man’s flesh and the young man’s white habit are acutely tangible, but the zone they occupy does not read as outward space. Zurbarán confronts his viewers with an explosion inside the mind, rather than offering them a pictorial composition in which all points on the canvas talk one to another.

That is why, in fact, “sacred art” might serve as a useful term. Spain’s great west-facing river port nurtured two painters who, ten years apart, made their mark in comparable ways. Velázquez first and then Zurbarán addressed the viewer’s fingers: you can feel the cool weight when the former paints earthenware, the coarse warmth when the latter paints fabrics. But the career of Velázquez took him eastward, into rapports with Rubens and with Italian painting, and hence into a lifelong wrestle with Europe’s “fine arts,” playing off what was palpably physical against that tangle of cultural hierarchies. The ambition to deliver a self-contained canvas, a painting for painting’s sake, belonged within that complex. It had a weaker hold in Seville, the takeoff point for the Americas, the city of merchants and trainee missionaries in which Zurbarán settled and prospered. By the 1630s he was running a large studio—the art historian Jonathan Brown characterized him as “a canny businessman”—for a clientele whose sights were set not only upward, Saint Francis–wise, but outward. Some of his workshop productions were shipped across the Atlantic to New Spain, a share that increased in the 1640s when Seville’s civic economy suffered a downturn. Whether for internal or external consumption, Zurbarán’s art was committed to a cohesive set of religious and national purposes, proclaiming them exultantly.

Insofar as you hear the in-talk of artists in this exhibition, it’s that of a bragging painter dissing wood-carvers. My textures are crisper and more seductive than yours will ever be! Zurbarán vauntingly affixes trompe l’oeil scraps of paper (cartellini) bearing his signature to that first Crucifixion and to a Saint Serapion from 1628, a martyrdom image in which the victim’s crumpled white linen, virtuosically rendered, lands most of the emotional impact. Moreover, Zurbarán seems to boast, I have these pigments at my disposal! This is to say that he treats his resources of vermilion, smalt blue, lead-tin yellow, and so on as exciting special effects, supplements to the groundwork reliably supplied by his blacks, whites, and earth pigments. Isolated blares of color zing out—a red cardinal’s hat, the orange warp of a damask, a regal shoulder bow of purple silk—in a lying-in-state scene, The Body of Saint Bonaventure (circa 1629), that otherwise relies on tonal alternations. The chiaroscuro choreography of this eight-foot-high canvas shows how commandingly Zurbarán could design when he had sixteen mourners to portray, but the grouping together of figures was merely an option in his tool kit. For a good half of this exhibition he—much like a sculptor—presents us with individuals in isolation. Hints that they might occupy rooms or landscapes are kept tightly rationed.

With pigments to hand, the painter could claim to resemble el Pintor primero—namely God creating Adam—“forming from earth, which is what colours are, bodies that if not alive are yet livingly portrayed.” Zurbarán was probably familiar with that contemporary rhetorical line, in this case set down by Vicente Carducho in his Dialogos de la pintura, published in Madrid in 1633. Comparison to the Creator might appear vainglorious, yet it could also be straightforward orthodoxy. On some level or other, it is the business of a Christian to imitate God. One humble but serious interpretation of that duty that Zurbarán undertook was the portrayal of bodies that do not pretend to be animate. The occasional independent still lifes he produced—this exhibition includes five—are so charged with wonder that “miraculous” feels a fitting epithet. Out of black formlessness, compact concrete entities—a lemon, a jug, a silver saucer—are summoned into bright rotundity: this, at its most distilled, is the performance of painting’s promise, and by the same token it reflects on the nature of matter. Things get created, and that is good: the homely, hand-friendly items appointed for the exercise give out joy. By virtue of being created, things cling to their originator: their existence is merely contingent, and a rose blossom dropped on the saucer’s rim, reflected by its silver, reminds us of their frailty.

By virtue of their inclusion in this show, the still lifes point back to the inevitable question behind any artist survey. Prayerful Christian, canny businessman: What kind of personality can we read into this display? Should we imagine Zurbarán—father also of a large family (Juan, his son, produced further still lifes; a few feature in the show)—as the Señor Normal of Seville during its early-seventeenth-century zenith of self-confidence? His manner steers a fine line between thrusting and temperate. When, for instance, he designs a circumcision scene for a Carthusian monastery’s high altar in 1639, he emphasizes what an acutely sensitive operation is being performed on the infant Jesus: the dramatic thinking is forceful indeed. Yet the little child submits without howling, as does that martyred Saint Serapion, and in contrast to the sculptures of Montañés or the paintings of Jusepe de Ribera—the Spanish artist most familiar to other Europeans during the period in question—Zurbarán’s art avoids any emphasis on blood or agony.

His color instincts are parallel. He arranges his fancy pigments like so many picked flowers—loudly, just this side of harshly. The teenage beauty queen presiding in TheVirgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians, the centerpiece of the above-mentioned altar, wears a viridian wreath sporting mauve blooms between her golden crown and golden locks, and a copper carbonate cloak draped over a dress of stunning pale pink in which she sits with her child on her knee. In common with Zurbarán’s female saints—we encounter four of these standing before us in near-life-size canvases, each in a distinctively selected costume—she is a proud young woman expecting male eyes to turn her way. Possibly that pink—the hue also of the frail rose petals—carries a certain gender coding: it cleaves again to the Virgin Mary as she hovers midair in a couple of Immaculate Conception canvases. Certainly through all these images the painter intends to praise women by dressing them gloriously—so much so that in the exhibition catalog, the art historian Benito Navarrete Prieto dubs him “Spain’s first ever fashion designer.”

The most historically intriguing instance of Zurbarán as costumier is a set of thirteen canvases, each with a life-size male figure, painted in the early 1640s. They were meant probably to go to New Spain, but by an obscure route they came to rest in 1756 in Auckland Palace, a bishop’s residence in northern England. The subjects depicted are Jacob and his twelve sons, to each of whom the patriarch assigns destinies at the end of the book of Genesis. Churchmen in the Americas liked to imagine that the ten tribes of Jacob’s descendants who had disappeared from the biblical record had resurfaced across the globe as their indigenous flocks. Thus Asher, the son designated to become a provident farmer, is attired by Zurbarán in a South Asian silk headscarf and an outlandish green kilt picked out with emblems of maize; he bears a shepherd’s crook, a golden heathen idol at his belt, and a basket of mouthwatering bread rolls. Here, and in the equally exotic Joseph, the other from the series in the exhibition, an artist is peering at the edges of his world and conjecturing: perhaps distant India and las Indias converge, perhaps scriptural origins and Spanish Empire complete a circle.

Zurbarán’s range could extend far. It stretched perhaps to another remarkable painting, a more than eight-foot-high canvas dominated by a giant’s grim visage. The attribution of this Colossal Head (circa 1635) is tentative, and the purpose behind it uncertain: full of sound and fury but signifying little, it was found in a Madrid palace and may be a one-off delivered to King Philip IV during a mid-1630s twelvemonth in the capital. The show, it is true, also reveals a fallible act. A couple of Labours of Hercules canvases painted during that stay in Madrid seem thinly imagined, if we set them beside mythologies by Ribera or Velázquez. Zurbarán with his preference for sharp definition might have done well to leave the clouds in those Immaculate Conception canvases to his successor as Seville’s lead painter, Bartolomé Murillo. He would have done better to have left less of The Surrender of Seville (1629), an uninspiring historical subject, to his assistants in the workshop.

Moreover, in the final six years of his life Zurbarán stopped being Zurbarán: in 1658 he forsook Seville permanently for Madrid and severity of outline for a late-seventeenth-century modish softness, to uncomfortable effect in the two instances here on display. Fallibility, however, was written into this Christian’s script. A seven-foot-high Christ on the Cross with the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and Saint John (1655) and a canvas half that size, The Crucified Christ with a Painter (1650), speak of our mere humanity more keenly and more personally than anything else in the show. The latter shows a man gazing up at the cross—one hand to his heart, the other to his palette—who shares a gaunt grief-stricken profile with the larger painting’s Saint John. Here, in effect, is the answer to the question the exhibition raises: when Zurbarán presents himself to his savior, we come as close as we can to the personality that unifies the show. This normal needful man shares that self-disclosure with us, and his impulse of contrition leaps out affectingly, whatever its specific causes. In that sense, his innovative sacred art does achieve a form of timelessness.