Peter Nolasco, an English monk, was the founder of the Mercedarian Order, aka Merced Calzada, or Shod Mercedarians.

This order had a special oath that the monks were required to take, in addition to the standard vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. The “special oath” was a big one, too; Mercedarians were obligated to offer up their own lives in exchange for hostages who were Christian and who might give up their faith under torture.

This painting, in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, was commissioned by Fray Juan Herrera, the leader of the Mercedarian monastery in Seville, called the Casa Grande de la Merced Calzada, to commemorate the canonization of Nolasco to sainthood. It was to be a part of a series of twenty-two paintings about the saint’s life, and his eventual martyrdom. The painting originally hung in the Sala de Profundis, (mortuary chapel), which was the room where wakes were held for deceased monks.

The series of paintings was to be done in a one-year period for 16,500 reales, and would require that he move from Extremadura to the Sevillian monastery (currently the Museo de Bellas Artes) with any of his people that he thought necessary. The entire series was probably never completed, and this painting may have been done so that Zurbaran could establish that he possessed the skills to finish the commission. One of the paintings in the series that has survived, Saint Peter Nolasco’s Vision, is in the Prado National Museum, Madrid.

The subject of the painting, Nolasco, apparently suffered a pretty horrific death, no matter which of the accounts written about him are true. One of the more generally accepted accounts has him being taken prisoner by English pirates in Scotland, where he was tied by his hands and feet to two posts, whipped, dismembered and disemboweled while still alive. If this wasn’t sufficient to kill him, just to be on the safe side, his neck was sliced just enough so that his head hung off to one side. A different version has him going to North Africa to exchange himself for Christian prisoners being held by the “Mohammedan enemy.” While waiting for the ransom to arrive, he apparently thought this would be a good time to attempt to convert his captors to his way of thinking; this did not work out well for him and the result was the same as with the pirate’s version of his death.

His violent and grisly death is what makes this image of Nolasco all the more striking; none of the wounds or blood is visible. Yes, he is tied by his hands and appears to either unconscious, asleep, or the most obvious: dead or on the verge of death. Zurbaran was not an artist to depict death in a graphic manner; even his Christ on the Cross shows only a minimal amount of blood, while another version appears to show none at all. As for the actual face in the painting, Zurbaran may have used a monk as a model for the unfortunate St. Serapion, as he was actually living in the monastery while he painted.