Page 57 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

There is of course a significant difference in iconography. In
the altarpiece Saint Francis appears with arms outstretched and
hands pierced in the oldest and most explicit attitude of receiving
the stigmata. Here, bearing the longer, pointed hood of the
Order’s strict Capuchin branch, he embraces a large Crucifix.
His face is drawn so near to the body of Christ that their gazes
are barely separated and their profiles become one. (see colour
plate p. 30) While only one stigmatum is visible, a ruddy spot on
the saint’s right hand, dashes of a lake red appear on his upper lip,
nostrils, and just discernible, in the deep shadow between his
cheek and Christ’s chest where penetrated by Longinus’s spear.
The image conflates several iconographies coined in the Counter-
Reformation and widespread during the period. These include
the Stigmatisation as a deistic communion, with Francis receiving
his wounds from a celestial radiance; the consolation of his
suffering and often transport to new ecstasy by a music-making
angel; and a more generic, iconic contemplation of the cross like
that of Jerome, the Magdalene, and other saints in meditation.20
The source is Bonaventure’s explication of the Stigmatisation as
a spiritual event:‘Eventually he realised by divine inspiration that
God had shown him this vision in his providence, in order to let
him see that, as Christ’s lover, he would resemble Christ crucified
perfectly not by physical martyrdom, but by the fervour of his Fig.16 ANTONYVAN DYCK
spirit.’21 The unusual scale of the Crucifix and the visceral The Crucifixion, Palazzo Reale, Genoa.
relationship of Francis also have a specific artistic source. In the
most theatrical and memorable of the new variations on the iconography of the Stigmatisation, Rubens had
rendered the saint full-length and responding to a life-size Christ on the Cross.22 Adapted byVan Dyck for the

20. See Helen Langdon’s essay in this volume. See also Rome, Calcografia: L’immagine di San Francesco nella Controriforma, catalogue
of the exhibition, Rome 1982.

21. Bonaventure, Major Life of Saint Francis, XIII:3, in M.A. Habig, ed., St.Francis of Assisi:Writings and Early Biographies.English Omnibus
of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, Chicago 1973, p. 731.

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