Zurbarán review – ecstatic visions, primitive surrealism … and the finest loincloths ever painted

National Gallery, London
The 17th-century Spanish master painted with a supernatural intensity that will hit you just as hard as it did his original viewers

The word “visionary” is done to death but the 17th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán demands it: he paints supernatural things naturally and natural things supernaturally. Space becomes different in his world, melting distance and erasing the barrier between you and the picture. The very first painting in this dreamlike ecstasy of a show dissolves logic. A monk robed in white kneels before a living man hanging upside down, his hands and feet nailed to an inverted cross: it’s a vision as real and close to us as it is to the awestruck monk, held in a penumbra of bronze fire, a stream of smoky light from heaven.

The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco from 1629 has been lent by the Prado and depicts Nolasco receiving a vision of the original St Peter who asked to be crucified upside down so he would not imitate Christ. Nolasco couldn’t make the pilgrimage to Saint Peter’s shrine in Rome, so the church founder mystically appeared to him at home in Spain. You might think this is sentimental folk art, the stuff of prayer cards. But one thing’s for sure: Zurbarán believed it and paints it with such incandescent conviction it becomes sublimely real. You can see why Salvador Dalí loved this artist and imitated his still lifes and crucifixions: for Zurbarán is a primitive surrealist. Several newly attributed paintings in this show include a wall-filling mask of a giant, possibly painted for a stage set: it makes a mockery of proportion yet is beautifully detailed, full of character, weirdly alive.