Caravaggio (1571-1610)
San Francesco in meditazione (Saint Francis in Meditation)
c.1606
Oil on canvas, 130 x 90 cm cm
Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona
The subject represents a Saint Francis “in desperate meditation on the Crucifix” (Longhi 1943), the penitent saint is represented outdoors in wild places, to increase the sense of solitude, particularly recurring in the last years of the painter’s stay in Rome.
The scene alludes to a passage from the Legenda maior by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio which tells of how Francis, having returned to Mount Verna in 1224, and opened the Gospel three times at random, always to the story of the Passion, meditates on his ultimate destiny of total conformity to the martyrdom of Christ which will later lead to the stigmata, which are actually still missing here.
The profound internalization of the revelation, emphasized by the presence of the crucifix which seems to stop the pages of the Gospel by imposing itself as the primary subject of meditation, reveals in the Cremonese painting some autobiographical implications in relation to the painter’s personal events. In fact, following the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni (28 May 1606), Caravaggio was subject to an obsessive desire for atonement.
This becomes even more evident the more recent hypotheses are confirmed regarding the commissioning of the painting by Monsignor Benedetto Ala, from Cremona, governor of Rome from 1604 to 1610, and on several occasions protector of Caravaggio, through whom perhaps he hoped to obtain the revocation of the capital ban.
Supporting this thesis is the face of the saint in which the painter’s features can easily be recognised. The hypothesis therefore becomes increasingly suggestive that through this painting he wanted to entrust his protector with a sort of confession of his state of mind and his resignation for a future that he foresaw was uncertain and with little hope.
The Ala coat of arms (a rampant lion with a wing in profile) can be recognized in the decoration of the frame; through the identification of the first owner, the subsequent events of the painting can then easily be traced up to its arrival in Cremona and its current location.
In the rich archive material that accompanies the life and work of Caravaggio (1571-1610), the San Francesco of Cremona is an undocumented work. This is the reason why critics came relatively late to recognize the canvas as a masterpiece by the Lombard painter.
The painting entered the collection of the art gallery in 1879 thanks to a donation from the Marquis Filippo Ala Ponzone. According to Roberto Longhi, it would be a copy of a lost original by Caravaggio. It was considered as such for a long time and exhibited at the Milanese exhibition in 1951. It was Denis Mahon who was the first to re-evaluate the painting in that year and to propose it as an autograph, also influencing the opinion of Longhi himself who from that moment was more optimistic about Caravaggio‘s autography. (Museo Ala Ponzone)