Page 46 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig. 2 ARTIST UNKNOWN to Soprani, Castiglione as a youth acquired and made drawings of
St Francis. small figures of saints.2 There survives at least one very early
painting of such a subject, a Penitent Saint Peter last reported with
the Roberto Lippo Foundation, London.3A large Saint Francis with
the Stigmata in a Genoese private collection (Fig. 2) has also been
attributed to Castiglione in the 1630s; while the composition is
related to that of an autograph pen study formerly in the Suida-
Manning Collection4 (Fig. 3), the attribution is unconvincing, at
least in reproduction. Eighteenth-century sources refer to four
more paintings in Mantua that must date from Castiglione’s late
activity: an ensemble of three altarpieces including a Martyrdom of
Saint Bartholomew in the Chiesa dei Servi and another altarpiece of
Saint Anthony of Padua in San Francesco.5 This Saint Francis in Ecstasy
is the most important work of its kind and the only late example.

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In other senses, the present work embodies the deeper identity,
operation, and import of Castiglione’s style. Formed in the
centre of international commercial activity and culture that was
Genoa at its height, carried to most major cities of the Italian
peninsula, and informed by every significant style with which he
came into contact, Castiglione’s art was more multifarious and
resistant to categorisation than that of any other seventeenth-

2. R. Soprani, Vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi, 2nd edition ed. C. G. Ratti, Genoa 1768, I, p. 309: ‘Nell’età sua
fanciullesca… Dilettavsi non solo d’acquistare, e contemplare figurine di Santi, ma eziandío di copiarne;…’

3. SeeT. Standring,‘A Signed Penitence of St Peter by G. B. Castiglione’, The Burlington Magazine, CXXVII (1985), pp. 160-61,
and Genoa 1990, cat. no. 3.

4. M. Newcome,‘Castiglione in the 1630s’, Nuovi studi, I (1996), p. 61.
5. The two sources are cited byT. Standring in Genoa 1990, p. 146. The Servite ensemble is described in N. Pio, Vite di pittori,

scultori et architetti: cod. ms. Capponi 257, ed. C. and R. Enggass,Vatican City 1977, p. 177, the Saint Anthony in G. Cadioli,
Descrizione delle pitture, sculture ed architetture che si osservano nella città di Mantova e ne’ suoi Contorni, Mantua 1763.

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