The Louvre made the Spanish Golden Age the headline of its autumn season on 7 October, opening 'Zurbarán, 1598–1664', a retrospective running to 25 January 2027. Put together with the National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago, the show gathers 65 works, fifty of them by Francisco de Zurbarán himself, tracing a painter remembered for stillness, discipline and an almost sculptural handling of light. The emotional centre of the hang is 'Saint Francis of Assisi' (1636), on loan from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Measuring 209 by 110 centimetres, the canvas shows the friar alone in a dim, indeterminate space, his brown habit modelled in a handful of ochres, his upturned face catching a light that seems to lift him off the ground beneath his feet. Around it, the exhibition unfolds Zurbarán's devotional world: a tender 'Christ on the Cross', immaculate virgins and martyrs, and the celebrated 'Borreguillo', a tied lamb on a grey table lent by the Prado, whose exactness of detail earned the painter his nickname of the Spanish Caravaggio. The show is curated by Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, chief curator of the paintings department. On the same opening day the museum unveiled 'Sculpting Colour', a companion display of painted wooden sculpture from the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid — works that have never crossed into France. The two shows together form the Louvre's self-declared Spanish week, supported by Deloitte as grand patron alongside the Cercle International du Louvre and the American Friends of the Louvre. Zurbarán stands beside Velázquez and Murillo as one of the great painters of seventeenth-century Spain, celebrated above all for religious commissions. Many of the altarpieces he painted for convents were dispersed in the nineteenth century, and France discovered him partly through the looting of the Napoleonic armies — a rediscovery that later drew the admiration of Courbet, Manet, Cézanne and Picasso.