St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata

The picture is painted on a panel with vertical veining that was pared down in the course of a restoration project of which we know absolutely nothing. The panel has also been lightly cropped along the bottom edge and the pinnacle topping the panel has also been removed. The painted surface is in good condition aside from a modicum of abrasion which, however, does not prevent the observer from still fully appreciating the free, confident brushstrokes on the saint’s habit and on the craggy rocks in the mountainous landscape.

A handwritten note by Federico Zeri on the back of a photograph of the painting in his Photographic Library tells us that the painting was held by the antique dealer Bellini in Florence in 1956 and was with French and Company in New York the following year, thereafter entering a private collection in the United States. Resurfacing at Bonhams in London in 2018, the panel was purchased on that occasion by the Galerie G. Sarti of Paris, and from there it was donated by the present owner to the Gaudium Magnum Collection in Lisbon. In addition to discussing its more recent collecting history, Zeri’s handwritten note also quite correctly suggests attributing it to the hand of Bicci di Lorenzo, a prolific Florentine artist hailing from a successful dynasty of painters who enjoyed unquestioned popularity in Florence and Tuscany for over a century¹.

The painting depicts one of the salient episodes in the life of St. Francis of Assisi – his Receiving the Stigmata – based on the account of the episode provided by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio in his Legenda Maior, a biography of the saint sanctioned as official by the General Chapter in Paris in 1266². From the steep slope rising behind the saint, Christ, in the shape of a seraph nailed to the cross, appears to Francis as he kneels in prayer in the foreground on Mount La Verna. Golden rays, gilded using the oil gilding process, emerge from Christ’s wounds to strike Francis’s hands, feet and ribcage, impressing on him the indelible signs of the Saviour’s martyrdom.

The composition reflects a long, consolidated iconographical tradition stretching back to the more authoritative interpretations of the theme developed by Giotto in the late 13th century in the hagiographical fresco cycle he painted in the upper church of San Francesco in Assisi and in the large pinnacled panel he made for the church of San Francesco in Pisa, which is now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Bicci di Lorenzo returned to the theme on more than one occasion in the course of his career, various examples including a fragmentary lunette in the church of San Lorenzo a Vicchio Maggio in Bagno a Ripoli, a panel in the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota and a predella panel in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome, where the scene also shows Brother Leo just behind St. Francis’s back³.

The Fundaçaõ Gaudium Magnum panel is instantly reminiscent of the work of Bicci di Lorenzo thanks to its narrative clarity, to the serene atmosphere pervading the scene, to the artist’s dazzling palette and to his irreproachable mastery of technique evident in the gilding of the background and the saint’s halo, as well as in the rapid, almost summary treatment of the plumage on the seraph’s red wings, in sgraffito on gold. Equally typical of Bicci’s manner is the dry, bony physique of the saint with his broad forehead, square cheekbones, straight nose and eyes marked by deep shadows, which bears a close resemblance to the face of St. Francis in the Coronation of the Virgin with Saints in the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, a painting completed in the first half of the 1430s. This is also likely to be the date of four small pilaster saints in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, especially St. Romuald and St. Peter, which display a clear affinity with the saint in the Gaudium Magnum Collection’s painting⁴.

A similar date is thus also likely for St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, where the vibrant sculptural emphasis and fullness of the saint’s forms, modelled with broad, flowing brushstrokes whose consistency thickens in the shadows, testify to the artist’s moderate interest in the new Renaissance style. He began to show a certain sensitivity to the new style in the 1430s, although he never truly revolutionised his own manner, which was based on the legacy of Andrea Orcagna in his father Lorenzo’s work, tempered by a lively enthusiasm for more explicit Late Gothic elegance.

Francis’s habit is brought to life by its broad folds sliding clearly over his body before falling to the ground, akin to the slightly stiffer folds in the large tunics of the figures in the pilasters and predella of the triptych in the Prepositura di Bibbiena (1435). Here, the rocky landscape serving as the backdrop to the Beheading of St. Paul recalls the craggy, slaty outcrops rising behind Francis’s back in the Gaudium Magnum picture, in which we can detect a timid interest in the handling of an austere, pondered space that reflects, albeit in a minor key, the interest shown by Bicci in the far more monumental and demanding commissions on which he was working in those years, such as his particularly successful triptych for San Niccolò a Cafaggio (1433)⁵.

The panel’s markedly vertical format, its narrow width and the fact that Francis is facing very obviously to the right all suggest that the painting was originally the lefthand wing panel in a triptych of considerable size designed for private devotion.

This same now dismembered triptych must also have once included a panel with St. Lucy and St. Bartholomew (fig. 1) formerly in the celebrated Achillito Chiesa Collection, which was shown at the American Art Association in New York in November 1927⁶, resurfaced on the American market more recently and is now part of a private collection in London. This panel, which is unquestionably by the hand of Bicci, was attributed to him as long ago as in the Chiesa Collection sale catalogue in New York in 1927. St. Lucy, with her slightly rounded face, languidly reclining, is one of Bicci’s favourite female types and bears instant comparison with both the St. Lucy Enthroned in the Acton Collection in Villa La Pietra in Florence, and with the (somewhat sharper) Virgin in the centre of the Vertine triptych dated 1430, now on permanent loan to the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, not to mention the Virgin in the altarpiece in the church of Sant’Agnese in Castellina in Chianti⁷. St. Bartholomew, with his pointed nose and bristly beard, is, for his part, a somewhat coarser twin of St. Benedict in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence and St. Paul in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, with whom he also shares a sneer barely hinted at on his lips⁸.

We may also be sure that the panel with St. Lucy and St. Bartholomew was originally the righthand wing panel of a tabernacle with doors. Any doubt in that connection is dispelled by the presence on the back (fig. 6), on the righthand side alone – i.e. the lefthand side facing the observer –, of traces of two dowels⁹ fixing it to the as yet untraced central panel. The dowels in question were removed when the triptych was dismantled. This indication is also confirmed by the clear torsion in the saints’ bodies and the classicising imitation porphyry decoration on the back of the painting, which must have been visible when the triptych was closed.

The fact that the panel with St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata has been pared down prevents us from ascertaining the presence of similar decoration or traces of metal hinges on the back of the picture. But having said that, what does argue in favour of the same origin for the two panels are their style, the same liquid consistency of the shadows (figs. 2–3), and a material analysis in that they share almost identical dimensions and the same rectangular format, similarly deprived of the pinnacles that once topped the panels.

The figures’ haloes are worked in the same way, with two dotted circles framing the central band of the extensively grained halo with its large, six-petal inflorescences interspersed with pairs of flat discs (figs. 4–5). Also identical are the small rounded arches – embellished on the corbels by three pointed punch marks arranged in a triangle – running along the edges of the two panels (figs. 2, 3). Externally, this perimetral decoration continued with a simple punched stamp on the spandrels of the arches (visible in the panel with St. Lucy and St. Bartholomew on Lucy’s left) and with a grained band that survives in mutilated form only in St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, which must therefore have been slightly less cropped at the sides than its twin panel. This minimal difference in conservation explains the millimetrical differences in the two wing panels’ dimensions (63,9 x 30,7 cm for St. Lucy and St. Bartholomew; 64,2 x 32 cm for St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata) and confirms the fact that they were originally part of the same triptych¹⁰, whose central panel must have been some 65 to 70 cm. wide and have depicted either the Madonna and Child or a narrative scene such as the Crucifixion or the Nativity of Christ¹¹, but which has yet to be identified.