Page 42 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig. 11. ANTONIO ALLEGRI DA CORREGGIO
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane,Apsley House, London

In a new way, St Francis in Ecstasy resonates with references to the iconography of Christ’s Passion, and this
invests it with a great emotional power. In St Bonaventure’s description of the stigmata he implicitly, as we have
seen, likens Francis to Moses in the desert, and Mount LaVerna becomes Mount Horeb.At the same time there
is an echo of Golgotha, the place of the skull, and the tenebrous sky calls to mind the desolate setting of van
Dyck’s Crucifixion, when,‘there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.And the sun was darkened,
and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.’ (Luke 23;44-45). His painting echoes, too, the subject of Christ
carrying the Cross, as Strozzi more stolidly had done, and, perhaps above all, of Christ on the Mount of Olives
or the Agony in the Garden. It has long been established that Franciscan iconography absorbed traditions related
to the Passion of Christ, and often St Francis is shown comforted by angels, as is Christ in many paintings of the

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