Page 66 - The mystery of faith

Fig. 8 Fig. 9

Traditionally, this subject is set in Francis’s cell, where he lies on a simple cot, surrounded by various
objects of meditation and mortification (the crucifix, a skull, a scourge, and so on), with a fellow friar
sleeping nearby. Several engravings of the subject using this interior composition were widely circulated
in early seventeenth-century Spain, one of the most copied being a 1604 engraving by Aegidius Sadeler
(Netherlands, 1570–1629) after a painting by the Veneto artist Paolo Piazza (1560–1621). When
Francisco Ribalta painted this subject for the Capuchin monastery in Valencia, he based his
composition on the print, but added another monk and a sheep. Later, working in a more tenebrist
aesthetic, a young Esteban Murillo placed the scene in a dark, indeterminate interior with Francis
listening to the angel playing a viola.2

Here, however, the brothers appear to have based their composition on an engraving by Agostino
Carracci after Francesco Vanni (Fig. 8),3 which shows Francis lying in a field, by a tree trunk or a rock,
as in the present relief, but cradling a Crucifix, his face turned away from the angel and his eyes closed.
Vanni’s tightly focused composition is more narrative than that in the northern engraving (which is

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