Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism
Jackson Arn | The Paris Review | 8th July 2026
A recent review of Zurbarán’s London show was straight up and down. Not this one. “By the late 1620s, Zurbarán had become the leading religious painter of Seville. [Yet he] makes paintings that are at once exquisitely lifelike and completely implausible. [It is hard to name a first-rate Zurbarán without this faint wrongness. People are less rational than they’d like to pretend, which is why all truly haunting images … share a slight, nagging offness.”
