Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [85]
Shortly after painting The Penitent Magdalen and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Caravaggio created perhaps the most daring of all his early devotional pictures. St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut. The painting is a nocturne, set in a landscape of gloomy indistinctness lit by the first distant gleams of dawn. The painter directs a focusing beam of divine light on to the form of the ecstatic saint, as he swoons into the arms of his guardian angel.
Scholars disagree about who commissioned the picture from Caravaggio. The two candidates are Ottavio Costa, a rich banker, and del Monte himself. There is a case to be made for either, and even for both. A picture of St Francis by Caravaggio is recorded in Costa’s will of 1605, while ‘A St Francis in Ecstasy by Michel Agnolo [sic] da Caravaggio with an adorned gold frame of four palmi’ was sold by del Monte’s heir in 1627.36 It is not known if these were one and the same picture, or two versions of the same composition. Cardinal del Monte’s Christian name was Francesco, and as we have seen he had a particular fondness for images of the saints. So, though the complications of its early history may never be fully unpicked, the picture now in Connecticut may well have hung at one time in the Palazzo Madama – perhaps not far from Caravaggio’s earlier painting of a musical rehearsal. There is a striking resemblance between the boy with Cupid’s wings in The Musicians and the angel cradling the ecstatic saint in the later picture. The same model probably posed for both figures.
St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is a crucial painting in Caravaggio’s early development. It announces the stark tenebrism that would become the hallmark of the painter’s revolutionary style – that ‘boldly dark and black colouring,’ in Bellori’s words, ‘which he used abundantly to give relief to the forms’.37 It also displays for the first time Caravaggio’s lifelong fascination for the strongest and most intense strains of Counter-Reformation Catholic spirituality. It expresses the idea of a transfiguring love of Christ, a love so deep that it becomes a form of mystic self-annihilation.
In Italy during the later years of the sixteenth century, the thirteenth-century Francis was regarded as the saint to emulate above all others. The Counter-Reformation Church looked back to the Middle Ages as a time of powerfully simple piety, uncomplicated by divisive theological speculation. Francis had practised an emotive, theatrical form of preaching, which spoke to the feelings rather than the intellect. He encouraged his followers to venerate nature as God’s blessed creation, and held that the only way to follow Christ’s message was to live it out in daily life. In prayer, he sought to visualize the events of the New Testament. In public, he would act them out, turning his own body into the living image of Jesus Christ. In sackcloth and ashes, haltered like a beast, he would re-enact the humiliations of the journey on the road to Calvary. The central event of Francis’s life was itself a miracle of empathetic identification. One day the saint focused his prayers so strongly on the image of Christ that the wounds of Crucifixion were miraculously branded on his own body. The idea of the stigmata was in turn burned into the Christian folk memory, becoming the ultimate symbol of the power of prayer and visualization to lead the believer towards God. This is the theme of Caravaggio’s picture, and it became a guiding principle of his art. All his religious paintings would be re-enactments or reimaginings, closely akin to the vivid theatricality of Franciscan devotion.
The miracle of the stigmata is most fully described in St Bonaventure’s mid thirteenth-century Life of St