A note on Francisco de Zurbarán’s A Cup of Water and a Rose
- Chris Millton
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
It’s a small painting, just 21x30cm, but powerful, seductive, pregnant with meaning. You don’t need to catch the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition starting in May at the National Gallery to see it, it’s part of their permanent collection, in room 30. Thought to be an autograph study, that is, produced without the aid of studio assistants, by the time Zurbarán painted A Cup of Water and a Rose in around 1630 he was Spain’s leading religious painter, though he’d painted mythological scenes for Philip IV’s palace, the Bien Retiro. For Sevillian painters still lives were a lucrative sideline, but this portrait is a still life and a religious painting, for it’s a portrait of the Virgin Mary in which she’s portrayed through her attributes.
The rose, plate and ceramic cup in the painting, with its two gracile handles suggesting the Virgin’s arms, also appear in Miraculous Cure of the Blessed Reginaud of Orleans (1626-1627), The Infant Virgin at Prayer (163-1635), and in his more famous still life, Still Life with Oranges and a Rose (1634), another ‘mystical still life’ in which the lemons are symbolic of faithfulness, the oranges purity and fecundity, the rose, divine love. It was not unusual for a painter to have a stock of ‘props’ that might appear in different paintings and most still lives are a combination of memory, imagination, direct observation, studies and sketches, with guessed at shadows, and Zurbarán would not have had these objects before him when he painted this work.
In this painting the symbology begins with the frame, which is unobtrusive and modest, its dark totality matching that of the painting’s background. It’s a reverse profile frame, meaning that its highest point is at the sight-edge (the inside edge of the frame). This is typical of Baroque art, thrusting what is depicted towards the edge of the picture plane, but it also, which is more germane to this painting, reduces the shadow cast onto the painting, shadows representing time, and therefore mortality. Much later, Giorgio Morandi would, in some of his metaphysical paintings of bottles and jars, banish shadows completely to evoke the eternal, and the timeless time of art.
The objects in this painting are life-size and close to the picture plane, encouraging, rather than a moving back to take in its architectonics, moving closer. Nearness of looking gives a tactile quality to what is looked at. As one move away from objects they lose their volume, become less substantial, eventually becoming apparitional. Here, this tactility of sight which cannot actually touch becomes metaphor for the Virgin herself: corporeal, yet divine, uneffable. By depicting Mary only through her attributes all carnality has been removed from looking at her, and the modesty, simplicity and clarity of the scene chastely evoke Mary, and the cup, rose, water and plate fluoresce from a symbolic, spiritual dark.
All paintings, like us, are at the same time material and metaphysical things. Paintings are philosophy, as our minds become intricated with them as we look sometimes it feels as if we’re thinking with the artwork, not about it. Paintings are also linguistic objects, inseparable from language. As soon as we encounter a painting, we bespatter it with language, initially with gobbets of noun. The more we look the more abstract becomes the language which we think. In this instance, for example, the first things that occur to us, are ‘cup’, plate, rose’, water, brown, black, white, before we move on from the denotive to the connotative.
When we think of a figurative work like this, we think also of it in terms of abstraction, even those who've convinced themselves they don’t like abstract art, for in the end all paintings are abstract: pattern, colour, architectonics, leitmotifs, tonal relations, shifts, modulation,s and transitions, colour symbolism and density, and so on. The black and brown colour fields that bifurcate A Cup of Water and a Rose, their relationship, and the very subtle intermingling of their joining are like a Rothko in little. This bifurcation is repeated tonally in the plate and the cup, just as the rose is split into pink and white – flesh and spirit - for it’s a painting about the interplay and paradoxes of the dualities of existence.
In A Cup f Water and a Rose there’s a hierarchy of surfaces, from the subterranean metal, to the earthly clay, to the flesh of the flower, to the purity of water, and finally to ineffable, divine light: Christ was ‘the light of the world’ and luminosity was God’s first gift on the first day of creation. The plate is of silver and represents redemption and the word of God, and all that is argent is associated with femininity and the moon. The plate's outer and inner rims and the mouth of the cup form three circles, the Trinity, eternity, the endless flow of life, and divine perfection. The water represents purity, virginity, and perfection. Mary was known as the Mystic Rose, while its white connotes Divine Love. The rose is thornless: the roses of the Garden of Eden only grew thorns after Adam and Eve had sinned, so this is a rose that points to redemption and the afterlife.
All of this codified symbolism of the era will have more resonance now for a devout Catholic, for whom it may retain its original meanings. Yet time has not rendered it dryly art-historical. The painting itself invites contemplation and close looking, and post-religion, its modesty and simplicity, its call to an attentiveness to the physical world, to the beauty of form and form-giving light, means that it is still, for a secular age, a work that is about, and inculcates, aspiration and a will to redemption, but the redemptive capacities of art, not God: “whoever increasingly strives upward ... him we can save”, wrote Goethe. And of course, all Christian imagery was previously pagan imagery, with much the same meanings, ones they retain in a secular age. Purity, aspiration, devotion, the desire to slough off of moral filth, all have meaning in the secular world, too. (Fellini uses a cup of water, held by a young woman (Caludia Cardinale) a symbol of purity in 81/2.)
Light itself, and the light of the intellect, we can regard as a gift, even in not from a god, just as we can see death as gift and destiny, as so many do when on its cusp. The beauty of the light on polished surfaces, the baroque, lyrical storm of reflection, shadow, light and the flesh of the corolla, where the material and the incorporeal are intermixed is no less beautiful for not having come from God. When Simon Weil wrote that “attentiveness is prayer” she didn’t necessarily mean a prayer to God but was venerating the state of prayerful attention to the world in and for itself. Art teaches *attentiveness to the physical world, tutors us in going inside ourselves to properly look at and aestheticise what we see, appreciating forms and the relations between them for their own sake. But such attentiveness is difficult; it is an aspiration, one that “A Cup of Water and a Rose metaphorises and instantiates.
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