Saint Romanus of Antioch and Saint Barulas

CC0 Public Domain Designation

1638

Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664)

Francisco de Zurbarán excelled at painting altarpieces that presented saints in an accessible manner, as required by the conventions of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church’s effort to oppose the Protestant Reformation and revitalize Catholicism. Catholic reformers emphasized that religious painting should offer easily recognizable figures and narratives in order to be accessible to a contemporary audience. This canvas, made for the high altar of the church of San Román in Seville, Spain, depicts the church’s dedication to Saint Romanus of Antioch. Romanus towers over Saint Barulas, a child of seven, who was inspired to martyrdom by the elder saint’s words. Romanus, himself martyred in 303 under the emperor Diocletian, holds up his own tongue, torn out by his tormentors, and grasps a massive book inscribed with a prayer invoking his intercession on behalf of the faithful.

Status: On View, Gallery 211
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Francisco de Zurbarán
Title: Saint Romanus of Antioch and Saint Barulas
Place: Spain (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1638
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Inscribed lower right: 1638
Dimensions: 246.5 × 185.4 cm (97 1/16 × 73 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Chauncey McCormick and Mrs. Richard E. Danielson
Reference Number: 1947.793
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/61665/manifest.json

Juan Agustin Cean Bermudez, Diccionario historico de las mas ilustres profesores de las be/las artes en Espana vol. 6 (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Ibarra, 1800), 48.
Paris, Galerie Lebrun, Vente de la Magnifique Galerie de Tableaux de Feu M. le Marechal-general Soult…, May 19, 1852, lot 28.
Paris, Hotel Drouot, Catalogue des Tableaux provenant de la Galerie de Feu M. le Marechal General Soult, Duc de Dalmatie…, April 17, 1867, 9 lot 6.
Charles Blanc, Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école espagnole, vol. 4 (Paris: Libraire Renouard, 1869), 8.
Justino Matute y Gaviria, “Adiciones y correcciones al tomo IX del ‘Viaje de Espana’ de D. Antonio Ponz. Carta III,” Archivo Hispalense: revista historica, literariay artistica 3 (Seville: [Sociedad del Archivo Hispalense], 1887), 318.
Manuel Gomez lmaz, Inventario de las Cuadros Sustraídos par el Gobierno Intruso en Sevilla el año de 1810 (Seville: E. Rasco, 1896), 61 no. 11.
H[ippolyte] Mireur, Dictionnaire des ventes d’art faites en France et a l’etranqer pendant les XVIII et XIX siècles (Paris: Maison d’éditions d’œuvres artistiques, 1912), 597.
August L. Mayer, “Die Ausstellung Alterer Spanischer meister in den Grafton Galleries zu London,” Zeitschrift fiir bildende Kunst 25 (1914): 72, 74, fig. 8.
Hugo Kehrer, Francisco de Zurbarán (Munich: Hugo Schmidt, 1918), 82, 138, 145, fig. 40.
Jose Martino Arroyo, Marycel (Barcelona: Revista de arquitectura, 1918), [40-1 ], 44, 54 (ill.).
“Zurbaran’s Saint Roman, the Martyr,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 16, no. 4 (1922): 58-9 (ill.).
August L. Mayer, Geschichte der Spanischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1922), 318, fig. 235.
Art Institute of Chicago, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection (Chicago: Art Institute, 1925), 171, no. 2357.
Catalogue of a Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture: Lent from American Collections (Chicago: Art Institute, 1933), 16 cat. 84.
Catalogue of a Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture 1934 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1934), 29 cat. 186.
Martin S. Soria, “Francisco de Zurbaran: A Study of His Style,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, no. 25 (1944): 155, fig, 1.
Paul Guinard, “Los Conjuntos disperses o desaparecidos de Zurbaran: Anotaciones a Cean Bermudez,” Archivo Espanol de Arte 19, no. 76 (1946): 263.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Exhibitions,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 42, no. 5 (1948): 73.
“Chicago’s Fabulous Collectors,” Life, October 27, 1952, np (ill).
Martin S. Soria, The Paintings of Zurbarán (London: Phaidon Press, 1955), 169-70, cat. 148, pl. 77.
Paul Guinard, Zurbarán et les peintres espagnols de la vie monastique (Paris: Editions du Temps, 1960), 50, 82, 198, 234, fig. 228.
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1961), 101, 489-90 (ill.).
Ramon Torres Martin, Zurbarán: el Pintor Gótico del Siglo XVII (Seville: Gráficas del Sur, 1963), 17 4, 208, no. 186a.
John Maxon, The Art Institute of Chicago (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 50, 51, 288 (ill.).
Katharine Kuh, “These are a few of my favorite things,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, April 23, 1972, 33.
Mina Gregori and Tiziana Frati, L’opera compteta di Zurbarán (Milan: Rizzoli, 1973), 102, 103, no. 227, pl. XLVII.
Julian Gallego and Jose Gudiol, Zurbarán, 1598-1664 (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 48, 85,195, cat. 120, fig.125.
Jeannine Baticle, “Zurbarán: Panorama de su vida y de su obra” in Zurbarán exh. cat. (Spain: Ministerio de Cultura, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, 1988), 94, 294 (ill.).
María Luisa Caturla, Francisco de Zurbarán (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 1994), 176, 205n30, 213, 214, 239n46, 364.
Andre Mandouze and Francesco Chiovaro, eds., Histoire des saints et de la saintete chretienne vol. 2, La semence des martyrs: 33-313 (Paris: Hachette, 1995), 249 (ill.).
Claudie Ressort, “Francisco de Zurbaran,” in Jane Turner, ed., Dictionary of Art, vol. 33 (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 1996), 731 .
Arsenio Moreno, Zurbarán (Madrid: Electa, 1998), 32, 131.
Odile Delenda, “Biografla ilustrada de Francisco de Zurbaran, Nuevos dates,” in Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Zurbarán ante su centenario (1598-1998) (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid; Soria: Fundación Duques de Soria, 1999), 83, 89, pl. 14.
Jeannine Baticle, “Zurbaran y Francia,” in Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Zurbarán ante su centenario (1598-1998) (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid; Soria: Fundación Duques de Soria, 1999), 183.
Odile Delenda and Wildenstein Institute, Francisco de Zurbaran, 1598-1664: Catalago razonado y critico, vol. 1 (Madrid: Fundaci6n Arte Hispanico, 2009), 62, 382-4, no. 120 (ill.).
Bonaventura Bassegoda and Ignasi Domenech, “Charles Deering y el Palacio Maricel de Sitges (Barcelona),” in Fernando Perez Mulet and Immaculada Sodas Batet, eds., La dispersion de objetos de arte fuera de Espana en las siqto: XIX y XX (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 2011), 41, 52, fig. 5.
Beat Wismer, Odile Delenda and Mar Borobia, Zurbarán: A New Perspective, exh. cat. (Madrid: Fundación Colección-Thyssen Bornemisza, 2015), 41 fig. 18.

London, Grafton Galleries, Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters in support of National Gallery funds and for the benefit of the Sociedad de Amigos def Arte Espanola, October 1913-January 1914, cat. 98.
Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress: Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, June I-November 1, 1933, cat. 186.
Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress: Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, June I-November 1, 1934, cat. 84.
Art Institute of Chicago, Masterpiece of the Month, October 1948.

Church of San Roman, Seville, until at least 1800 [Cean Bermudez 1800]; removed by government decree and deposited in the Alcazar, Seville, 1810 [lmaz 1896, no. 11]; taken by Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult (1769-1851), 1st Duke of Dalmatia, Paris, by 1812 [see the Getty Provenance Index database, F-23, which lists the painting in Sault’s estate inventory of February 5, 1852, as no. 150; date of acquisition according to Delenda 2009]; sale of his estate, Galerie Lebrun, Paris, May 19-22, 1852, lot no. 28, presumably bought in [according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague; copies in curatorial file, and Baticle 1999]; by descent to his son, Napoleon-Hector Soult (1802-1857), 2nd Duke of Dalmatia, Paris [according to a postmortem inventory of his collection, dated January 18, 1858; Getty Provenance Index database, F-197, no. 9]; by descent; sold, collection of Marshal Soult, Hotel Drouot, Paris, April 17, 1867, lot no. 6, for 5,330 francs [according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague; copy in curatorial file]. Sergei Ivanovich Stchoukine, Paris and Moscow, until 1910 [this and the following according to London 1913; date according to Delenda 2009]. Joachim Caravallo, Château de Villandry, France, from 1910 to 1914. Grafton Galleries, London, from 1914 to 1918 [Kehrer 1918; date according to Delenda 2009]. Charles Deering (1852-1927), Chicago and Miami, by 1918 [Arroyo 1918]; by descent to his daughters, Mrs. Chauncey McCormick (née Marion Deering) and Mrs. Richard Ely Danielson (née Barbara Deering); given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1947.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

On View

Status

Department

Artist

Title

Place

Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Medium

Inscriptions

Dimensions

Credit Line

Reference Number

IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

Explore Further

Suggested Terms

On View

Date:

Artist:

About this artwork

Status

Department

Artist

Title

Place

Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Medium

Inscriptions

Dimensions

Credit Line

Reference Number

IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.

Extended information about this artwork

Publication History

Exhibition History

Provenance

Share

Explore Further

Sign up for our enewsletter to receive updates.

Gallery actions

Image actions

Share

IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.