The Apotheosis of St. Francis of Paola

St. Francis of Paola is shown at the height of one of his most celebrated visions: taken up to heaven on a platform of clouds, he allows his staff, his canonical attribute, to fall to earth in order to turn to his mystic interlocutor, whose head is suffused in light. Soaring sinuously into the air, at dawn or dusk, the angel shows him a shield bearing the motto «CHA», alluding to the charitas on the luminous banner of the Order of Minims, which the Calabrian saint (1416-1507) had founded within the broader Franciscan family in the 15th century.

The painting was first attributed to Simon Vouet by Erich Schleier¹, an attribution subsequently confirmed by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée in 2018². It is an important addition to the artist’s catalogue in that it is very probably a preparatory work for a larger version – it, too, on canvas – which the artist was to paint between 1625 and 1627, towards the end of his lengthy stay in Italy (1613-1627). Valid comparisons can be made from a stylistic and typological standpoint with another bozzetto depicting Angels with the Instruments of the Passion and God the Father Blessing the Cross (fig. 1), itself a preparatory work for the most prestigious commission that Vouet was ever to receive in Rome, consisting of a large (and unfortunately now lost) altarpiece for St. Peter’s Basilica, painted by «Monsù Simone» in the Chapel of the Canons, in dialogue with Michelangelo’s Pietà, between 1624 and 1626³. Dominique Jacquot has recently credited Vouet with another bozzetto on a similar subject but with a different composition (fig. 2) also celebrating St. Francis of Paola^[iv]. Rather than on any formal grounds, the attribution – put forward when the painting under discussion here was still unknown – appears to rest primarily on the existence of a print signed by Claude Mellan (fig. 3), engraved as a mirror image c. 1626 in the basis of a design by Vouet himself⁵. Yet the picture published by Jacquot does not appear to display the freshness of the original idea of such a great master as Vouet, being more likely, in my opinion, to be the transposition of a lost autograph “model” made by one of the artist’s close collaborators. This would explain a certain harshness in the construction of the main figure and of the angel upper right, which are more compatible with a workshop copy produced on the basis of a bozzetto by Vouet which has yet to be tracked down. There can be no question, on the other hand, regarding Vouet’s paternity of the bozzetto under discussion here, which alternates perfectly finished areas with others executed in a skilfully succinct fashion. The thin, liquid pigment, applied on a brown primer which can still be seen in certain areas, appears perfectly to reflect the fluid brushwork typical of Vouet’s work while in Rome (in this connection, a second thought visible to the naked eye in the position of the fingers on the saint’s right hand is of particular interest). The influence of Giovanni Lanfranco’s manner also provides further confirmation of the date suggested by Schleier and Brejon de Lavergnée for the painting’s execution (1625-1627), i.e. shortly before Vouet’s return home.

The bozzetto and the potential finished work were to serve as illustrious prototypes for other images celebrating St. Francis of Paola produced in Rome in the first half of the 17th century, both from a compositional standpoint and for the proto-Baroque thrust of the composition which was to enjoy enormous popularity throughout the 17th century. The reference here is to that swirling sense of movement conveyed by the small composition, which was to become a typical feature of the large Baroque decorative schemes (one has but to think of the “turbulent” and illusionistic fresco decorations typical of the period). Even of Vouet had never transposed this invention into a larger picture, it must still have been of fundamental importance for several of his Roman assistants and pupils, with Charles Mellin of Lorraine topping the list. We can see this clearly, for example, in the St. Francis of Paola that I have attributed to Mellin (fig. 4), which hangs in the complex adjacent to the church of San Luigi dei Francesi that currently houses the archive of Les Pieux Établissements de la France à Rome et à Lorette⁶.  This work, which can be dated c. 1627-1628 on stylistic grounds, is likely to have been the first of several depictions of St. Francis of Paola produced by Mellin, whom we know to have been working for the Minims in Trinità dei Monti in the early 1630s. He frescoed the convent and also painted a now lost altarpiece depicting St. Francis of Paola in Ecstasy, which is known to us from a coeval engraving by Karl Audran (fig. 5) and a later autograph “memory” now in the Musée Lorrain in Nancy⁷. By comparison with this latter canvas, with its clear echoes of Poussin and its richer, stringier brushwork, the San Luigi dei Francesi picture condenses Vouet’s impact in a far more original manner, pushing it in a new and more overtly Baroque direction – it, too, influenced by Lanfranco’s painting in terms of the artist’s compositional choices and of his fluid, frayed brush strokes.

That this latter picture was painted by Mellin is suggested by the construction of the broad folds of Francis’s habit, the smooth, “buttery” handling of his hand with a slight gap between his index and middle fingers (see the Houston St. Sebastian, c. 1625-1626), and the jagged, rocky crevasse in the background with a tiny glimpse of the horizon, similar to the one we see in St. Francis in Meditation in a private collection (fig. 6), which I have also attributed to Mellin⁸. This latter picture, painted early on in the artist’s career – indeed possibly as early as 1624-1625 – shares with those mentioned above both the overall arrangement of the composition and the limited palette, confined to brownish hues skilfully juxtaposed with dark green and azurite applied “a risparmio”.

On this basis, Vouet and his assistants abruptly modernised their painting, often working (as in the case of the picture under discussion here) for French or Francophile members of the papal court associated more or less directly with the Minim community on the Pincio (we should remember that Vouet chose Fathers Silvestro Ocono and Bernardo Printo as witnesses to his marriage to Virginia Vezzi in Rome in April 1626)⁹. Besides, in the early 17th century, the iconography of St. Francis of Paola enjoyed a revival fuelled both by devotional reasons and, at the same time, by political convenience, because as we know, the Calabrian saint spent a long time at the court of the Valois by order of Sixtus IV, becoming the private advisor and “spiritual guide” of fully three French kings. Reports of his sanctity and thaumaturgic skills led, in 1482, to his travelling to the court of Louis XI, who had summoned him to cure him of a serious illness. The pope and the king of Naples seized the opportunity to firm up their fragile ties with France, spying a chance to reach agreement over the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438 (a royal decree issued by Charles VII, in which the sovereign declared himself the guardian of the Church of France’s rights, thus marking the first step on the road to Gallicanism and the secularisation of Canon Law).

Francis spent the rest of his life in France, where he was venerated as a saint in his own lifetime, to the point where Charles VIII was prompted to contribute to the founding of two monasteries of the Order of Minims, one in Plessis-lèz-Tours, the other on the Pincio in Rome. Vouet’s depiction of the divinely inspired hermit saint was thus his tribute to a transnational hero, an emblematic figure of the renewed alliance between the pope in Rome and the French crown, a bond sealed afresh at the start of the age of the Barberini.