Page 68 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

as adjectival, rather than a defective nominative (for‘Stimatizzazione’) or poor gerundive (for‘riceve le stimmate’),
this descriptive would suggest a representation of Saint Francis with the Stigmata.The description could just
as easily apply to the early painting of Saint Francis in a Genoese private collection introduced by Newcome.
Indeed, she suggests that it ‘may be the one by Castiglione that Ratti cited on the high altar in the Cappuccini
church in Campi.’38 Again, however, its style, closer to that of Orazio De Ferrari, does not accord with
Castiglione’s even at his earliest. Attempts to recognise the hand of Luciano Borzone, Assereto, Vassallo or
even Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari are no more convincing. Unless Ratti was mistaken in his attribution, there
is no reason to suppose that he was describing this painting. Short of a document of the commission, a
relationship between the Capuchins at Osimo or their patrons and Genoa, or a detailed description of the
painting at Campi, the available evidence points toward its identification with the present painting.39

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For all the ways in which the Saint Francis in Ecstasy represents an extension and refinement of Castiglione’s
preceding style, it also predicts and prepares some of the most significant aspects of his late development.
Created on the threshold of his return to Genoa in 1652, it fairly announces the religious subjects of a devotional
character that would become a major part of his activity over the last decade. Unprecedented, and practically
opposite, the works of this period are characterised by ecstatic imagery, tumultuous form, and rapid execution.
These characteristics are usually and correctly ascribed to the influence of Bernini as he completed the Cornaro
Chapel, not to mention the empyrean heights of Cortona as he began decoration in Santa Maria inVallicella. The
reckoning with the visionary, extroverted High Baroque, however, had begun with the altarpiece for Osimo and
become complicated in this Saint Francis. On the one hand, the painting was a summoning of stylistic forces to
test the mettle of venerable naturalism and to explore the adequacy of interiorised expression against the new
proposition. On the other, it can be seen as a form of reculer pour mieux sauter, with the very reach and quality
of its synthesis readying the operation necessary for the assimilation of its stylistic antithesis.

38. Newcome 1996, p. 65, n. 26. According to Standring (private communication on 23.3.13), that painting’s owner believes it
to be the work of Castiglione and the painting decsirbed by Ratti, stating that it was purchased from the church at Campi by
a member of the Ansaldo industrial concern.

39. This is also Standring’s more recent conclusion. In his file he allows Campi first as‘one possible provenance for this magnificent
painting’ and then as ‘the probable provenance of this painting.’

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