Page 38 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig. 7. BERNARDO STROZZI made a pilgrimage to Mount LaVerna. In the plague year of 1576
St Francis with the Cross, National Gallery of Wales, he transformed Milan into a theatre of penitence, carrying a relic
Cardiff of the holy nail, and walking through the streets of Milan with
‘bare feet, a rope around his neck, like a condemned man’.16The
rope echoed the symbolism of the Capuchin cord, and Carlo
practised the meditations on Christ’s passion propagated by the
Capuchin preacher Mattia da Salò. Here, after the turn of the
century, a trio of artists, Morazzone, Cerano and Giulio Cesare
Procaccini, responded to the penitential asceticism of this thread
of Catholic Reformation spirituality; they developed an intense
religious art, where anguished, spectral faces, and a harsh,
expressive realism, make a strong emotional appeal to the
spectator. Their works were popular in the picture galleries of
Genoa, where the emphasis on paintings of St Francis is striking.
The poet, Marini, in his collection of poems about paintings, La
Galeria, celebrated a St Francis in Ecstasy by Camillo Procaccini
which he had seen in the house of Gio Carlo Doria, whilst archives
and inventories suggest that there were many of Morazzone’s
paintings of St Francis and St Charles in Genoese collections. Half
length figures of St Francis by Cerano are also recorded; his St
Francis in Ecstasy (Fig. 6) had set the pattern for very many
derivative works which attest to its great popularity.17 This image,
so severe, clear and direct, was intended to stimulate devotion; St
Francis, frail and suffering, displays the stigmata to the worshipper.

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16. San Carlo Bascapé, as given in E.Brivio, The Life and Miracles of St Carlo Borromeo, Milan 1995, p.15.
17. This section is indebted to M.C.Galazzi,‘ I Lombardi e I loro “amici” genovesi: pittori e collezionisti fra Genova e Milano, 1610

– 1630’ in Procaccini.Cerano.Morazzone.Dipinti Lombardi del primo Seicento dalle civiche collezioni genovesi, catalogue of exhibition,
1992, pp.11-20.

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