St Francis in Meditation

Author: Surya Stemerding

The way in which St Francis of Assisi is depicted in this drawing is typical of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. His iconography was transformed by the Counter-Reformation. Illustrations in which he is seen in front of a prominent skull only began appearing after the end of the Council of Trent, in the second half of the sixteenth century. This scene captures him just after he has received the stigmata, when Christ’s death on the Cross prompts him to contemplate his own death. That graphic memento mori marking the convergence of Christ’s human/finite and divine/infinite natures was particularly popular in the first half of the seventeenth century.^[1]

The same kneeling figure is depicted upside down on the verso of the sheet, but now seen from the front. His arms are crossed in the same way, with the right arm over the left, and the hem of his habit has the same undulating folds as on the recto. The study on the reverse is only a fragment, because some of the paper was later trimmed off, removing Francis’s head and the tops of his shoulders. The fact that he was drawn twice suggests that this was a workshop study in which the artist was experimenting with different views of the saint.

After being auctioned in 1989 as ‘Florentine School, early seventeenth century’ it was bought in 1990 as a work by Bernardo Castello (1557-1629) on the basis of its affinity to a chalk drawing of his in Florence, although only its subject is the same.^[2] From a stylistic point of view the study appears to make a better match with a Bolognese or Marche artist of the second half of the sixteenth or first quarter of the seventeenth century. Albert Elen suggested the Florentine artist Fabrizio Boschi (1572-1642) as a candidate, based on a comparison with two drawings of standing figures in heavy draperies in Paris, one of Zacharias and the other of a man leaning on a stick.^[3]