Page 58 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig. 17 BERNARDO STROZZI, St Francis in central motif in the altarpiece for Rapallo, this variation would
Prayer, National Gallery of Art,Washington. not have escaped Castiglione. Indirectly, the painting at Rapallo
had additional bearing on the present image. Van Dyck and his
workshop produced numerous small-scale replicas of the
crucified Christ in the altarpiece, with the one extant autograph
version in the Palazzo Reale, Genoa (Fig. 16).23 These images
for private devotion were evidently fashionable and surely
important in the spiritual life of Genoa’s leading families during
the second quarter of the century. Of identical size relative to
the saint, seen at the same oblique angle, and cognate in
articulation, with its thick pigment evoking a precious object, the
Crucifix in this painting seems to recall these images, giving
further resonance to Francis’s attitude.

Castiglione’s interpretation of this iconography and complex
reference to Flemish models had an important precedent in native
Genoese painting. Bernardo Strozzi had made a specialty of
devotional images of Saint Francis.24 The earliest, like versions in
a Genoese private collection and in Washington (Fig. 17), are
conventional in imagery, with the saint in prayer before a small
cross, and Sienese in flavour, with a rarefied palette and loose
handling.25 During the 1620s they became more eccentric in
composition but more realistic in execution, with the saint
variously holding, embracing, entwined with a large Crucifix

22. Presumably lost, the painting is known through at least four copies, the best of which is in the Prince of Lichtenstein Collection,
Vaduz, inv. no. 60; H.Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard:Saints,I, London and New 1972-73, cat. no. 101. The original
probably dated from the late 1610s.

23. Inv. no. 947; Barnes 2004, cat. no. II.11. See also Genoa 1997, cat. no. 66.
24. See A. Banta, Bernardo Strozzi: Defining an Artistic Identity in Early Seventeenth-Century Genoa (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation),

NewYork 2007, chapter 1:‘Mirrors of Perfection: Strozzi’s Images of St. Francis,’ pp. 9-60.
25. Genoa, private collection, andWashington, National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 2002.78.1; L. Mortari, Bernardo Strozzi, rev.ed.,

Rome 1995, cat. nos. 7 and 89 respectively.

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