“... to see the world bathed in a new light”: Bellini’s St. Francis In the Desert
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St. Francis in the Desert. Giovanni Bellini. C.1480. The Frick Collection. New York.
The animals know something is up. The donkey’s ears perk. A rabbit peers cautiously out of a crevice in the rock wall. The heron stiffens.
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A strangely bent laurel tree directs attention to St. Francis. In the background, barely visible, a shepherd has stopped to stare at the unfolding scene.
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Francis’s body arches slightly but perceptibly as the light envelopes him. Not as Bernini’s undulatory, sensual St. Teresa in Ecstasy, but with heightened tension and awareness. The effect is both subtle and intense.
The light that washes St. Francis is strange. It is not the sunlight we see on the topmost building of the city in the distance. This light travels from the upper left of the painting down to the far right side. It is the light that has drawn the saint away from his holy book and his lecturn, to shed his walking stick and sandals and walk, with his arms held wide and palms open into this new, and revelatory, moment, -- the moment that he receives the stigmata, the holy wounds that Christ himself received. Bellini shows us only those on Francis’s hands and on his exposed foot (visible today only with x-ray imaging) and has omitted the wound in the side. The saint’s mouth is open, leaving us to wonder if he is speaking/praying/singing aloud. His eyes are trained on something outside the picture frame.
Francis’s little wattle-poled retreat that he has built behind him is a total world unto itself. His sturdily crafted desk, memento mori, humble crucifix that bears a crown of thorns and bound book all speak to his daily contemplations. The cultivated plantings in a raised brick bed and the ceramic pitcher next to it show human endeavor and manufacture in contrast to the rocky desert bed, wild growths of plants and tiny flowers (daisies?) of nature’s design.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), founder of the Franciscan order, is believed to have received the stigmata — the wounds of Christ's Crucifixion — on 14th September 1224 (the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross) during a thirty day retreat in preparation for Michelmas on Mount Alverna in the Apennines. The locale of the landscape was specified by Bellini and was Francis’ place for prayer and contemplation. An accompanying friar, Brother Leo, witnessed the event but Bellini has excluded him from his rendering.
The genius of this painting is the ability of the artist to create “moments” within the scene that are in themselves masterpieces, and yet present it as a whole, a complete painting that works together in synchronization with its parts. We are at a loss to understand how Bellini has done this...it is as if the painting itself has a pulse. And yet we are able to look at each part of it and then step back, taking it in its entirety...and allow ourselves beguilement...
Stigmata as a symbol in art has also been employed by Goya in the raised hands of the peasant in his “Third of May” and occurs on the fallen warrior’s hand in Picasso’s “Guernica.” In these two instances, it seems that the stigmata receivers are innocent martyrs who have not deserved their earthly fate and can only find their ultimate reward after an honorable death. But Francis was not a martyred saint. As the first person to receive the stigmata, Francis was, according to Franciscan belief, given the markings by Christ himself and in recognition of the saint’s profound devotion to the suffering Christ underwent during the crucifixion.
It is interesting that other artists depictions of this scene typically include a helpful seraph, a mightily strange --and a little creepy-- looking creature with six wings (you’ll see various imaging of this thing on Google). Caravaggio presents Francis with a pleasant faced two winged angel, a more fitting image for the later, Baroque era. But Bellini has given us a “reality based” version, in which the natural world is quietly celebrated and no heavenly being appears.
Here is Caravaggio’s version
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St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. c.1596. Wadsworth Atheneum. Hartford
Here Caravaggio explicitly refers to the stigmatization wound in the saint’s chest, “a wound to the heart.” Francis falls back in a faint, supported by the angel. The pose suggests that Francis has suffered a metaphorical death so he can be reborn spiritually in Christ’s image. The wound to his heart expresses the origin of the miracle in the burning love which Francis felt for Christ, making him privileged to share the pain of the Crucifixion. Although difficult to see, Brother Leo is crouched off to the left, witnessing the act. The holy light here is a beam, providing dramatic chiarascuro of the event (a technique Caravaggio excelled in using). According to Caravaggio historian Catherine Puglisi this painting “exerted immediate influence on painting in Rome” and had an influence on later artists who would “portray saintly visionary experiences in equally tangible terms.”
A wonderful little video on the Bellini -- and how it was acquired into the Frick’s permanent collection in 1915-- is here
http://www.frick.org/interact/frick-collections-colin-bailey-bellinis-st-francis-desert
If you are near enough to Manhattan to get to the Frick Collection it is at 1 East 70th Street, near Fifth Avenue. The Bellini is never loaned out and has had restoration done as recently as 2011.
What are you waiting for?
= new reply since forum marked as read
3000 miles is too many.
However, your post takes me there, PLUS it gives me great explanations of what is going on in these works.
Thank you for continuing my education.....I guess I'm not too old to learn, even at this point in my life.
I could have done 3 posts dealing with this work alone, the scholarship is so vast. Tough to weed out so much...
One of the more delightful ones is the Friday art posts from CTyankee. No chair throwing in these threads. It's a bit of peace, beauty, and education on Friday afternoon. A great way to start the weekend.
I was amazed at both 
amazing that the wh photographer caught that exact moment...
I'm sure the RWingers will accuse the WH of doctoring the pic to make Obama look more saintly...LOL...
...in the 1960s translation by P.A. Bien (in looking it up I found numerous other translations on the market now). Because of a fellow student in college who introduced me to "Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises", Kazantzakis powerfully captured my imagination in those years. I ended up reading everything of his I could get my hands on.
NK was a Cretan, raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. He saw absolutely everything as the life and death struggle between the spirit and the flesh. I recall that at one point NK had Francis smashing a clay jug that he owned because he liked it and because it was a man-made thing that tied him to the Earth. Another time he flung himself into a snowbank to further mortify his flesh. NK renders so many elements of the myth gloriously -- I think it was he who put the image of the almond tree blossoming into my mind. ("I said to the almond tree: Sister, speak to me of God; and the almond tree blossomed."
It was only years later that I realized just how many of the books that influenced me in high school and college were not just written by men, but for men. Probably my first glimmering was in Psych 101, when the myth of Parsifal is unfolded as the ideal awakening of the young person's psyche as he individuates and matures into adulthood. I was troubled by the fact that this was all about boys and men, and here was I, a young woman of 18 reading this, wondering vaguely where my story was. But as I say, it took me many years to put my finger on the problem.
Saint Francis in the Desert recalls this to me. A beautiful painting, indeed, and with so many lovingly rendered touches of the natural world. A man trying with all his might to find the other-world opening, and break through from Here to There, touch the feet of God. How wondrous.
And here am I, no saint, almost 50 years on from my reading, to say, "It is here, Brother Francis, all around you. The other-world opening was the almond tree all along."
What a gift you have, CT, for making me see things.
...is not the only culture that has a flesh-denying religious base (some sects of Hinduism, some sects of Buddhism; IOW it's not just the Abrahamic religions), but the Christ story that permeates our mythology so thoroughly can be hard to explain to people who live outside it. The fine points of theology that differentiate one branch of Christianity from another are hard enough to grasp even for some Christians born and raised here, yet we absolutely take for granted in nearly every movie plot that a hero will come forth and will consciously sacrifice himself that others may live and flourish.
This was strongly born in on me back when The Lord of the Rings movies were being released. I knew that story from reading and rereading the books. I never questioned the premise. It was my cousin's wife who jarred me out of that by impatiently asking what was the whole point? She's Mainland Chinese; a very literate woman in her own culture (as she explained, she was educated at home by her father using the Chinese Classics, because school life was impossible during the Cultural Revolution); and as I stumbled through an increasingly difficult explanation, I realized I was trying to explain Western cultural history itself. Without even any stigmata --no, I take that back: Frodo carries his wounds forever.
Hah. Bookish me -- and you bringing all these images into view and explaining them. I go forth to get some groceries with a smile. Thank you so much for this occasion.
In the Caravaggio St. Francis - is it possible that Caravaggio painted his own face as the face of the Saint? That face just looks so darn familiar...
Or is the model already known, and I'm just being stupid?
I love your Friday art posts!
Last edited Sat Apr 11, 2015, 08:21 AM - Edit history (1)
here's a pic from the NY Times after the painting was returned from its restoration a few years ago
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EDIT to add: this painting was analyzed with x ray technology that yielded lots of information previously unknown e.g. details of Bellini's technique in underpainting on the head of St. Francis and handprints (not determined to be Bellini's) that spread the gesso in preparation of the wood panel prior to painting. The detail of the city in the background was nothing short of genius. Then, there has also been the botanical analysis of details about the flora -- the list of analyses of this work that have been made over the years is exhaustive, not to mention the determination of each species of the animals that appear (the donkey is an Asian onager, the tiny red bird at the water spout far left is a kingfisher, etc, etc). It's fascinating, but takes a long while to wade through...I had a tough time deciding on how I would approach the thing and had to leave out LOTS of information that has been gleaned by art researchers...
I am an art teacher with no formal art history training, but I've absorbed a lot simply through art books in the pre-Internet age. I absorbed enough to pass the Praxis tests without studying for them.
(I also grew up in Oberlin, and used to spend many hours looking at art books in the vast art history library in the Allen Art Museum.)
For me, I love the clarity and quality of light in Bellini's paintings. It is the ferocious detail in early Renaissance painting, like Durer or Holbein the Younger.
