Page 31 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

VISIONS & ECSTASY

Since the mid 16th century the rich maritime republic of Genoa had been famed for the legendary
ostentation of its palaces and the sumptuous decoration of its churches. John Evelyn, visiting the city in
1644, marvelled at the‘well-designed and stately palaces’, and at the splendour of the churches, especially
the Franciscan church of SS Annunziata delVastato,‘founded at the charges of one family’, which‘in the
present and future design can never be outdone for cost and art’.1 The city had long fostered a particular kind
of artistic patronage, whereby its first families proclaimed their wealth and status;Valerio Castello’s Fame of the
Balbi Family, a light and airy figure in dazzlingVenetian colours, heralds the triumph of the wealthy Balbi family,
and ushers in a glorious age of celebratory fresco painting. (Fig.1)

But by this date reality was very different.The city was in crisis, marked by political strife, economic failure,
famine and disease.The poor were rapidly growing in number, and in 1653, the Albergo dei Poveri, the largest
institution of this kind in Europe, was founded. In these same years Castiglione, who with Castello dominated
Genoese art in the middle years of the century, painted his St Francis, the saint of poverty and humility, wearing
the pointed hood of the Capuchins, and embracing the crucifix in the mountainous landscape of LaVerna. His
painting is rooted in a long Catholic Reformation tradition of representations of St Francis, which had been
particularly popular in Genoa, yet he brings to it a new expressive power and a sense of the heightened spiritual
drama of the Roman baroque.This essay looks at the roots of this tradition, and explores how Castiglione enriches
it with an unusually complex and resonant range of iconographic and artistic sources.The 1650s were a turning
point in Genoese art, and both he and Castello mark a moving away from the naturalism of early 17th century art.

In the years of the Catholic Reform, and increasingly after the Council ofTrent, St Francis seemed the perfect
exemplar of poverty, penitence and humility, virtues which lay at the centre of a new spirituality. In literature
and painting there is a fresh emphasis on the saint’s mystical and visionary aspects. Fourteenth century artists

1. J.Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed.W.Bray, London 1854, 1, p.87

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