The MNAC, the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston are collaborating in this exhibition that will bring together for the first time the three versions of Saint Francis of Assisi according to Pope Nicholas V's vision, a major work by Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). The absolutely exceptional possibility of comparing the three paintings sheds light on each of them. The work preserved by the MNAC has undergone a thorough restoration process that has allowed it to recover its original appearance and bring to light details hidden by the passage of time.

In Saint Francis of Assisi according to Pope Nicholas V's vision, Zurbarán depicts a legendary episode according to which the Pope requested to see the Saint's mummified body in the crypt of the Basilica of Assisi. The painter condenses a complex narrative action by focusing on the essential and shows us only the Pope's subjective vision. Zurbarán arranges the figure of Saint Francis like a work of art in a museum, working with light, space and geometric construction. He thus gives it strength and a prodigious presence, making it seem as if the Saint's mummy takes on a life of its own. Based on the contemplation of the real, the images transport us beyond reality, or inside it, his soul.

This exhibition will also bring together other works by Zurbarán, including the two subtly different twin versions of his famous Still life with vessels, one from the Museo del Prado and the other from the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. In these paintings, Zurbarán generates an aesthetic of emptiness, distance and presence, and of silence, where we do not distinguish everyday life from religious mystery.

Zurbarán demonstrates that art models images that do not replicate reality but transcend it into something that brings us closer to the mystery of life. In it, nature becomes a revelation of the supernatural. His works are devices for deep contemplation, for meditation that opens us to a spiritual experience. The simplicity and purity of his forms fascinate us and approach a contemporary sensibility. The way he treats the themes is a metaphor for art, but also for the power of images, its capacity to generate the illusion of reality, an experience that we know so well in the 21st century.

This exhibition will also show how Zurbarán's work reaches contemporaneity and will place it in relation to works by contemporary artists with whom a continuity in formal synthesis and spiritual aspiration can be appreciated, such as Alfons Borrell, Toni Catany, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Josep Guinovart, Antoni Llena, Aurèlia Muñoz, Marta Povo and Antoni Tàpies, as well as Antoni Llena and Eulàlia Valldosera, who have created works especially for this exhibition.