Emilian school, 17th century, Saint Francis

Emilian school, 17th century Saint Francis Oil on canvas, 73 x 59 cm With frame, 83 x 69 cm Patron saint of Italy, Saint Francis (Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone; Assisi, 1181/1182 - 1226) is the saint par excellence in the Western collective imagination. The doctrine based on his teachings by the large group of faithful who, devoted, followed him in pilgrimages and acts of charity towards the weakest, allowed the development of a revolutionary form of asceticism, more heartfelt and human. The renunciation of any material goods in the conviction of a full and perfect life if totally dedicated to God, made Franciscanism the expression of the best and fraternal pauperistic spirit then desirable. In the present painting, the Saint is depicted in an ecstatic attitude, while he raises his eyes to the sky absorbed in an inner prayer. The human skull, a traditional symbol of materiality and temporality of life, manifests in this case the total poverty to which the saint was dedicated. The book that can be seen under his elbow refers both to the Gospel of Christ, which the saint honored with his behavior, and to the generous literary work handed down to us by him, within which it is possible to remember the Canticle of the Creatures. The stigmata, on the other hand, according to Catholic mysticism, came to him, the first of the saints to receive them, thanks to the strong spiritual union reached with Jesus; receiving the signs of suffering was a result of the identification with Him: as Dante recalls (Divine Comedy, Paradise, canto XI, vv. 106-108: "On the harsh rock between the Tiber and the Arno he received from Christ the last seal that his limbs bore for two years"). The painting has several stylistic affinities with the work of Guido Reni, placing itself in the fertile Emilian context of the full seventeenth century. Although there are compelling comparisons with the Saint Francis variously adoring the Cross or depicted in ecstasy, made by the workshop of Annibale Carracci (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) or by Bartolomeo Passerotti (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale), it is with a canvas of homologous subject painted by Reni and now kept at the Louvre Museum in Paris, that the examined painting intertwines convinced formalisms. Conceived correspondingly, the two paintings both show the same, emotional, fluttering in the eyes of Saint Francis, turned to God; the surrounding rocky landscape, punctuated here and there by branches and creeping plants in the stone, warms the solitude of the saint. Guido Reni executed a second version of the painting, modifying the position of an arm of Francis and arranging the entire composition specularly with respect to the present ones; this version, executed for the church of the Girolamini in Naples around 1622 ca., where it is still preserved today, was placed in the Coppola chapel, already sponsored to Sant'Alessio, only in 1675.