Page 48 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

nearly a decade. Castiglione’s first public works of religious subject matter came after his repatriation from Rome
in 1639. These projects reflect Genoese patrons’ readiness to embrace the up-to-date style that his art represented,
and equally the artist’s economic interests. The translation of his style into this new context, in particular the
reconciliation of the Genoese traditions he had already synthesised and contemporary Roman modes for religious
painting, would become an almost dialectical process requiring numerous attempts and steady calibration. This
process began sometime after 1642 with the altarpiece of the MysticalVision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux for the
church of San Martino in Genoa’s western suburb of Sampierdarena, later transferred to the new parish seat of
Santa Maria della Cella (Fig. 4).8 The subject combines the traditional iconography of Saint Bernard trampling
the Devil with the remarkable image of his sensory union with Christ on the Cross expressed by embrace and
drinking of the blood from the wound of Longinus’s spear. Corresponding to the revived cult of the saint in Genoa
in the early seventeenth-century, this extravagant image anticipates the formal liberties and spiritual fervour that
would characterise Castiglione’s research of religious subjects in the 1650s. Bernard’s embrace recalls the central
motif inAnthony van Dyck’s altarpiece of Francesco Orero Adoring Christ on the Cross with Saints Francis and Bernard in
the church of San Michele at San Michele di Pagana, Rapallo (Fig. 5), the one public work from the artist’s long
permanence in Genoa,in which Saint Francis responds bodily to a life-sized Crucifix.9 It would remain a touchstone
of Castiglione’s religious imagery, including a lost altarpiece of the Miracle of Saint Nicholas ofTolentino at Cordova,10
and determinative for the present Saint Francis in Ecstasy. Apart from this reference, there is practically no
accommodation of local stylistic habits or for that matter Castiglione’s established interests. Most of the articulation
refers to immediate Roman precedents: the broad, rather simplified form of the saint toAndrea Sacchi, the accurate
plasticity and the vibrant colour to followers of the Bolognese influence ofAnnibale Carracci such as Mattia Preti
and Pierfrancesco Mola if not Guercino, the types and warm shadows evident especially in the angels to Poussin.
The result is piecemeal and, given the visionary nature of the subject, strangely static. The geometry of the
composition appears contrived and fragmentary while the space seems inconsistent and incomprehensible, at
curious odds with the singularity of the event and the intense naturalism of its parts. For all the intensity and local
meaning of its iconography, the painting seems a display of recent stylistic acquisitions.

678

8. L. Magnani in Genoa 1990, cat. no. 13.
9. S. J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck.A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, cat. II.12. See also Genoa,

Palazzo Ducale: Van Dyck a Genova, catalogue of the exhibition by S. J. Barnes et al., Milan 1997, cat. no. 72. On the relation
of this painting to the Miracle of Saint Bernard, see Magnani in Genoa 1990, p. 117.

50