We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling. It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure. This is Casild...
The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant. This painting by Marcel Verdier, Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies , is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse , focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way. In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched...