Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c.1595
Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Writing for his Capuchin brethren in the second half of the sixteenth century, the chronicler Bernardino da Colpetrazzo (1525–1593) described the sequence in which the wounds arrived on Monte La Verna in September 1224. The mind of Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) turned first to God, and only then did the body begin to change, the right hand before the left, the feet after that, the side last of all, and when it was over the saint dropped to the ground as though he were dead. That final clause names a moment no earlier painter had wanted, and it is the moment Caravaggio (1571–1610) chose for his first religious picture. Nearly everything readers have found strange in the canvas follows from that choice.
Three departures from the standard treatment govern the composition, and they pull in one direction. No seraph occupies the sky and no shaft of light descends to the saint; the wounds in the hands and feet on which the texts dwell are nowhere shown; and Francis, rather than kneeling upright to receive the marks, has fallen back into the arms of a young angel. The single wound Caravaggio grants is at the side, and the saint’s hand moves towards it. Bonaventure (c.1217–1274) had in a sense licensed the omission, since in the Legenda maior [The Major Legend of Saint Francis] the marks appear only once the vision has faded, which left a painter free to separate the two events and still claim the text.
The pose given to that collapse came from a body of images with no Franciscan content at all. A figure held up by an angel repeats the types of Christ supported by angels, above all the Agony in the Garden before the crucifixion, the Lamentation after it, and the devotional Man of Sorrows (Askew 1969, pp. 290–294). Read through those types, the surviving side wound stops looking like a remnant and begins doing the work of the picture, since it is the wound that bleeds most freely in images of the Man of Sorrows and the one Thomas was invited to touch. Keeping that mark and dropping the others lets the canvas assert in paint what Franciscan writers had asserted for three centuries in words, that Francis was an alter Christus [another Christ], conformed to the Passion in his own flesh.
Whatever the theology, the picture was assembled from objects in a room. Under examination in the libel suit brought by Giovanni Baglione (c.1566–1643) in the late summer of 1603, Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) let slip that he had lent his Lombard friend a Capuchin habit and a pair of wings, which is as close as the documents come to an inventory of Caravaggio’s props. The loan is recorded a decade after the Hartford canvas was painted and cannot be attached to it, though it establishes that such things circulated between painters and that the wings in this picture, stiff and rather too small for the body they are fixed to, need no supernatural explanation. The habit is worth attention for a different reason, since its cut is the reformed Capuchin one rather than the Conventual Franciscan, which places the image inside the most austere and most rapidly expanding branch of the order. The angel’s face, meanwhile, recurs in the Cardsharps and among the musicians, near enough that one studio boy served for the lot.
Explaining the darkness as the plain fact of a night scene has become harder to sustain. The blacks belong to a Lombard habit of mind reaching back through Savoldo to Leonardo, in which deep shadow carried a devotional charge, and behind that habit lies the Franciscan reading of Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom union with God is reached in a darkness beyond seeing and knowing rather than in light (Muraoka 2024). On that account the black closing around Francis functions as the medium of his experience rather than its setting. His eyes are all but shut and he has ceased to attend to the visible; the light falls instead on the angel, who in the celestial hierarchy belongs to the rank appointed to lead human beings towards God. Painting the slack, weighted body from a posed model is what makes that inward movement, from the seen towards the unseen, something a viewer can follow.
Which moment Caravaggio meant remains unsettled, and the ablest readings disagree. One takes the picture for the ecstasy that followed the stigmatisation and rests its case on the Capuchin account of the swoon (Treffers 1988); another argues from Franciscan and Capuchin texts that the stigmatisation itself is shown, anomalies and all (Lingo 1998); a third treats ecstasy and stigmatisation as a single instant, Francis dying as a man in order to be reborn in Christ (Moir 1982). A canvas able to sustain three such readings has been built to hold an inward event answering to no single outward moment, which is why the sacred pictures could strike Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696), writing in 1672 of the Cerasi Chapel laterals, as scenes without action.
The documents that survive concern a banker’s health rather than a cardinal’s taste. The old suggestion that Francis wears the face of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1626), in whose household Caravaggio was then living, has lost ground as the papers have accumulated, and the earliest secure owner is Ottavio Costa (1554–1639), banker to the papal court, who by 1606 held three canvases by the painter, this one with the Judith and Holofernes now in Palazzo Barberini and the Saint John the Baptist now in Kansas City. Believing himself mortally ill, Costa drew up a will on 6 August 1606 in which the abbot Ruggero Tritonio (1543–1612), secretary to Cardinal Montalto, was to choose between the Saint Francis and the Martha and Mary Magdalene, the rejected picture passing to his banking partner Juan Enriquez de Herrera (d. 1610). Tritonio chose the Francis and Herrera took the Magdalene, now in Detroit. Costa then recovered, and on the reconstruction that best fits the surviving receipts he honoured the bequest with a copy while keeping the original, exactly as he did with the Baptist promised to his Ligurian oratory, which received a copy that hangs today in the diocesan museum at Albenga . The picture the abbot got is recorded in Tritonio family inventories from October 1607 and stayed with his heirs until the last of them gave it in 1894 to the parish church at Fagagna; it is now in the Musei Civici at Udine, and it is not by Caravaggio. Costa also had a private reason to want the subject, a second son lately baptised Pier Francesco, for whom the saint stood as namesake (Ebert-Schifferer 2012).
References
Armstrong, R.J., Hellmann, J.A.W. and Short, W.J. (eds) (1999–2001) Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. 3 vols. New York: New City Press
Askew, P. (1969) ‘The angelic consolation of St Francis of Assisi in post-Tridentine painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32, pp. 280–306.
Christiansen, K. (1986) ‘Caravaggio and “L’esempio davanti del naturale”‘, The Art Bulletin, 68, pp. 421–445.
Ebert-Schifferer, S. (2012) Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum
Lingo, S. (1998) The Capuchins and the Art of History: Retrospection and Reform in the Arts in Late Renaissance Italy. PhD dissertation, Harvard University
Moir, A. (1982) Caravaggio. New York: Harry N. Abrams
Muraoka, A.H. (2024) ‘From Leonardo to Caravaggio: affective darkness, the Franciscan experience and its Lombard origins’, Arts, 13(2), article 68.Available at: https://www.academia.edu/117231504/From_Leonardo_to_Caravaggio_Affective_Darkness_the_Franciscan_Experience_and_Its_Lombard_Origins (Accessed 10 June 2023).
Spezzaferro, L. (1974) ‘The documentary findings: Ottavio Costa as a patron of Caravaggio’, The Burlington Magazine, 116(859), pp. 579–586. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i236690 (Accessed 10 June 2023).
Spike, J.T. (2001) Caravaggio. New York and London: Abbeville Press.
Treffers, B. (1988) ‘Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz [Reports of the Art-Historical Institute in Florence], 32, pp. 145–172.