Page 62 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

implication of location in space and action in time. The iconography of Francis contemplating the Crucifixion
automatically alludes to the Stigmatisation; this painting, with its low viewpoint, ascending composition, and
insistent nature, obviously does not describe La Verna but certainly invokes a location and an event. Beyond
that, the richness of the landscape, the bodily absorption of the saint, and the thorough binding of the surface
of the canvas are consistent with fundamental Franciscan ideas about divine immanence in the created world
and communion with nature as an essential form of spirituality. It is perhaps relevant to Castiglione’s grasp
and appreciation of these ideas that his brother, Giovanni Paolo, took vows with the Franciscan order in 1642.27
A broader explanation lies in Castiglione’s own personality and style.The meaning of this painting ultimately
coincides with the representational concerns long expressed in his characteristic works: the transfiguration
of familiar matter, the immersion of man in physical reality, the contingency of sensory experience. In its
replete and vibrant naturalism of earlier, principally Genoese origins, this painting demonstrates Castiglione’s
synthetic ability at its most developed and thoroughgoing. In its harnessing of this naturalism to a specific
spiritual content, it is unique in his art.

678

There is one more, highly significant dimension to this representation of Saint Francis: the character and
intensity of its feeling. For all of the exuberance of his style, Castiglione tended to avoid or suppress displays
of explicit and legible emotion. Trudging or frolicking, his personages prefer to turn their heads, avert direct
glances, or if visible, to present masks, tragic, comic, in any case toward caricatural, which disclose little that
is individual and usually nothing of an interior life. The celebrated etchings of imaginary heads are the epitome,
intriguing but ultimately hidden beneath exotic costume and graphic flourish (Fig. 19). The gestures of his
figures are analogous, frequently understated in charged situations while over-characterised in straightforward
ones, and generally uncoupled from familiar denotation of response. Neither psychological, like Rembrandt’s,
nor rhetorical, like Poussin’s, Castiglione’s human content is largely conveyed by form itself in a different kind
of elevation of matter - a primarily metaphoric expressiveness. In this painting, however, the saint’s face is
prominent, certainly because he is alone, and more because it appears at the apex of the composition. The
elegant shape, suave angle, and patrician features of the head itself resemble Van Dyck’s types, like the Man of
Sorrows at Birmingham and, from just after his return to Antwerp, the principal in the Brera’s Vision of Saint

27. Timothy Standring has called my attention to a document in the Archivio di Stato, Genoa, NA 6020: On 13 March 1642,
Castiglione, in Genoa, receives power of attorney for his brother Giovanni Paolo, who is taking vows with the Order.

64