Page 64 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig.21 GIOVANNI BATTISTA CRESPI (Il Cerano) Battista Crespi in particular. Cerano had been a favourite of his
Madonna dei Miracoli of Santa Maria presso region’s Franciscans from his earliest works, notably his first
altarpiece in Milan, the so-called Votive of the Franciscan Saints for
San CelsoVenerated by Saint Francis and San Carlo the Capuchin church of the Immaculate Conception.30 Later,
Borromeo, Galleria Sabauda,Turin. effectively the official artist of Federico Borromeo’s Milan, he
invented much of the iconography of San Carlo, with which
Franciscan imagery is intertwined, and a virtual taxonomy of
devotional images of the saint. One variation, with Francis full-
length, in profile, and bearing a cross, derives from the altarpiece
of the Madonna dei Miracoli of Santa Maria presso San CelsoVenerated
by Saint Francis and San Carlo Borromeo atTurin (Fig. 21), so parallel
to the relation of the present picture to the altarpiece for
Osimo.31 In the most subjective and intense variation, in the
Brera, the saint appears half-length, thinly laid in over a dark
ground with coruscating accents of white, ravaged flesh passing
into ecstatic spirit (Fig. 22a).32 Emblematic of Milanese
spirituality between the great plagues, this variation saw
innumerable versions (Fig. 22b Milan, Castello Sforzesco),
determining future imagery of the saint in Lombardy and
doubtless reaching Liguria. An inventory of Giovan Carlo Doria’s
paintings compiled before 1621 records no less than eighteen
works by Cerano including item 355,‘Hun Santo Francesco del
Cerano…’33 More than an earlier Genoese response to Milanese
style, Gioacchino Assereto’s numerous versions of a stark,
distorted Saint Francis in ecstasy demonstrate the influence of

31. Turin, Galleria Sabauda, inv. no. 464; ibid., cat. no. 87. Rosci records two derivations, one seemingly autograph in a Milanese
private collection and a more elaborate version by Cerano’s brother and follower,Ortensio, in aTurin private collection (ibid.,
cat. no. 89).

32. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, inv. no. 1006; ibid., cat. 152. Rosci remarks that ‘rimane questo il prototipo delle immagini ‘di
pietà privata’ del secondo decennio, di grandissima fortuna, documentata dal numero di copie e derivazioni’, some of which
he describes and illustrates.

33. Genoa 2004, pp. 192-95

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