Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [86]
He marvelled exceedingly at the appearance of a vision so unfathomable, knowing that the infirmity of the Passion doth in no wise accord with the immortality of a Seraphic spirit. At length he understood therefrom, the Lord revealing it unto him, that this vision had been thus presented unto his gaze by the divine providence, that the friend of Christ might have foreknowledge that he was to be wholly transformed into the likeness of Christ crucified, not by martyrdom of body, but by enkindling of heart. Accordingly, as the vision disappeared, it left in his heart a wondrous glow, but on his flesh also it imprinted a no less wondrous likeness of its tokens. For forthwith there began to appear in his hands and feet the marks of the nails, even as he had just beheld them in that Figure of the Crucified … The right side, moreover, was – as if it had been pierced by a lance.38
St Bonaventure makes a minute distinction here. The Lord makes it known to Francis that he will be transformed into ‘the likeness of Christ crucified’ not by the mortification of his flesh but by the inner burning of love in his heart – ‘not by martyrdom of body, but by enkindling of heart’. It is love, not pain, that transfigures the human being in search of God. Once Francis understands this, the seraph disappears. A wound appears in Francis’s heart at that very moment; immediately afterwards the marks of the stigmata appear on the saint’s hands and feet.
Caravaggio’s composition indicates not only that he had read St Bonaventure’s Life of St Francis, but that he intended to dramatize the crucial moment in the story – the moment when, as the seraph disappears, the wound appears in the saint’s heart. As Caravaggio’s saint swoons backwards, he reaches involuntarily with his right hand towards a rent in his habit where a wound in his side has already started bleeding. There are no signs of stigmata in his hands or his feet, and there is no seraph in the sky. There was no precedent, in depictions of St Francis, for including the wound in his side and omitting the others. There was no precedent, either, for the compassionate kneeling angel who cradles the saint in his arms. Caravaggio was also the first artist to depict the saint lying down at the moment of his stigmatization.
In every sense – style, iconography, drama – the painting broke new ground. It certainly gives the lie to the slander that Caravaggio was an untutored Lombard realist, bent solely on dazzling with the mimetic brilliance of his art. St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is a picture full of subtle, poetic reflections on the deeper meaning of Francis’s transfiguring moment of communion with Christ. Barely visible in the gloom behind the angel and the saint, a little group of shepherds is gathered round a campfire, one of them pointing excitedly to the heavens. Here, Caravaggio consciously echoes the traditional imagery of Christ’s Nativity – which had itself often been painted as a nocturne – as if to imply that at the moment of his swooning ecstasy Francis really has been reborn in the image of Christ himself. Implicit in this brief moment of death-in-life is, therefore, a second birth for Francis, marking out his destiny to live only in and for Christ – to live as alter Christus, or ‘another Christ’, as his legend had it.
The group of saint and angel echoes another tradition of Christian art, recalling images of the dead Christ cradled in the arms of his mother, the Virgin Mary. Caravaggio’s angel is taller than the figure of St Francis, which has sometimes been put down to the painter’s youthful clumsiness, but this too is actually a poetic device, enhancing the pathos of the saint’s helpless body: in many images