user: Input: Facebook Falls Again in Third Day of Trading
5:01 p.m. | Updated to correct closing price.

For Facebook, the third time is not proving to be a charm.

Shares of Facebook fell again on Tuesday, the social network giant’s third day as a public company. Its shares closed at $31, down 8.9 percent for the day and down 18 percent from their initial public offering price of $38. Trading was heavy, with more than 101 million shares changing hands.

The continued struggles of Facebook shares in the public market are sure to turn up the heat on a number of parties. They include the Nasdaq stock market, whose technical problems on Friday marred Facebook’s first day of trading; Morgan Stanley, which led the social network’s initial public offering and has been criticized for pricing the stock too richly; and even Facebook itself.

Investors and analysts have been questioning how the company should be valued.

Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG, said in a research note on Monday that Facebook’s updated prospectus, showing the number of active users growing faster than ads, hurt confidence in the I.P.O. “The timing of the disclosure, however, is peculiar at best and more likely concerning,” he wrote.

He added: “To be fair, valuing Facebook is more art than science at this stage of its development and the current state of both social and mobile advertising.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An earlier version of this post misstated the closing price of Facebook shares on Tuesday. It was $31, not $31.12, and the decline for the day was 8.9 percent, not 8.6 percent.
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It's about: Facebook's stock closed at $31 on Tuesday, down 8.9 percent for the day. The shares are off 18 percent from their initial public offering price of $38.


Input: The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700
Dead Christ (1625-30) by Gregorio Fernández and 'The Lamentation over the Dead Christ', early 1620s by Jusepe de Ribera at the National Gallery Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

This is the most powerful show the National Gallery is ever likely to hold. One can say that without overstatement. It is not common for people to weep at a press view, nor to fall silent with awe, but both happened this week at the National Gallery.

Lifesize figures appear spotlit in sepulchral gloom, appealing to you eye to eye, bringing the mysteries of faith and the soul into brilliantly vivid reality. The Sacred Made Real could hardly be a better title for the show, or for these artists' achievements: famous painters from El Greco to Velázquez, forgotten sculptors such as Juan de Mesa and Juan Martínez Montañés, now resurrected for our times.

Here is a vision of darkness falling upon the face of the earth that feels so real it's as if the gallery's lights have blown. Here is a long-dead saint whose tears appear to course wetly down his cheeks.

St Francis stares heavenwards, mouth and eyes a trio of dark holes that seem to suck the last light into their depths: the end of time. Christ's crucified body emerges from blackness, broken knees bent awkwardly into our space. The impulse is to reach out and touch – "Everyone who sees it," wrote a Spanish contemporary, "believes it to be a sculpture"; amazingly, it is a painting.

Zurbarán's shattering Christ on the Cross – never seen in Britain before – looks as though it is still hanging in the crepuscular Dominican friary for which it was made, the half-light from the actual window incorporated into the image. Hyper-real right down to the last damp tendril, the last pinprick of congealed blood, its power never wavers for an instant – yet the illusion it offers is not of life so much as painted sculpture.

Look at the wooden figures all around it in this show, and you see that this is the model. But which came first: image or sculpture?

Zurbarán started out as a painter of sculptures, not canvases. And it is possible that the friars wanted a sculpture but were unable to afford more than a painting. Go to this show (if you possibly can) and you will understand the value of these treasured objects – weeping, meditating, gesticulating, pleading, evoking in the viewer the same emotions they body forth, these figures have extraordinary force of personality.

Some are actual portraits – St Francis Borgia, emaciated, bald, his hook nose more of a limb than a feature, staring at the crowned skull that became his emblem (the sight of a royal head putrefying in an open grave was his epiphany). Ignatius Loyola, the veins standing out on his hypertense brow (the sculptor, Montañés, was working from a death mask). St John of God, guardian of the sick, lowering his dark eyes with a look so inward one senses his utterly single-minded purpose.

Other sculptures have the character of revelation, of ecstatic visions in darkness, of immense suffering silently endured, of what it is to be attacked. John the Baptist's head lies toppled on a dish, the sightless eyes still half-open at the moment of death, the windpipe so cleanly severed one could put a finger into the empty cross-section: this is what the horror was like.

One marvels that it is possible to conjure such damage in painted wood. But the obvious question – whether one should really be admiring these religious objects, many from Spanish churches, as art – does not arise since they declare their devotional purpose immediately. The real question becomes instead the differing powers of painting compared to sculpture.

Take the Virgin Mary. A statue can encircle her with three-dimensional stars, give a sense of what sort of space she might have occupied on earth, how tall she might have been, what kind of shadow she cast. You might want to touch the gilded hem of her garment. But a painter like Velázquez can raise her up to the moon in some numinous afterlife. He transforms her into a timeless vision for the imagination; the sculptor makes her real in the here and now.

The most affecting sculpture here, by Gregorio Fernández, is also the most harrowing: the deposed body of Christ laid out on a table. You look down upon the tortured, broken corpse, the ashen face sinking in rigor mortis, the poor knees skinned to pulp, the black atrophy of the nail-pierced flesh. Nothing could more powerfully embody the reality of Christ's suffering.

It is an effigy, certainly, but an effigy to the life – and death. It is the husk of the body after the spirit has flown. A painter could not achieve this literal metaphor, the perfect coincidence of religious belief and aesthetic form. Once seen, never forgotten.

But painting triumphs in the end. After all, the greatest sculptures here depend upon the brush's eloquence to make them more personal than monuments. True, there are glass eyes and diamond tears, plaited palms and skulls for props. But it is through the delicate nuance of these coloured surfaces that the figures come to life.

And though every single work here inspire awes and emotion – whether you are a believer or not – it is painting that draws you into true fellow feeling. Velázquez shows the whipped Christ looking very like the sculptures in this show, but with his back turned away so that we cannot see the oozing lacerations. Instead we are presented with a little child's response to the suffering – perfectly innocent, perfectly sad. It is how we all should be when confronted by such visions: full of empathy and compassion.
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It's about:

assistant: The National Gallery's exhibition of 17th-century Spanish religious art stirs the mysteries of faith into sensational life, says Laura Cumming