Bellini, Giovanni (c.1430-1516)
San Francesco in estasi (St Francis in Ecstasy)
c.1475–1480
Oil on panel, 124.1 × 140.5 cm
Frick Collection, New York
Details of Giovanni Bellini’s birth and early life remain largely unknown. He grew up in Venice, his likely birthplace, training with his brother, Gentile, in the workshop of their father, the painter Jacopo Bellini. During the first decades of his career, Giovanni contributed to large-scale works in collaboration with his father and brother. In 1453, the painter Andrea Mantegna married Giovanni’s sister Nicolosia, inaugurating a mutually profitable artistic exchange between the two artists. Living by himself by 1459, Bellini began receiving commissions for larger works in the early to mid-1460s. By this time, he ran a large workshop that produced altarpieces, portraits, and pictures for private devotion. History paintings and mythological scenes would follow in the artist’s later career. While focusing on an individual or group of figures, Bellini’s paintings also increasingly emphasized the landscape and profited from the application of oil paint, which came to replace tempera in much of his work. Highly influential by the turn of the sixteenth century, Bellini does not seem to have ever left the Veneto, where he died of natural causes in 1516.
The painting was commissioned by the Venetian nobleman Giovanni Michiel, probably as a devotional piece for his collection. By 1525, it had entered the collection of the prominent aristocrat Taddeo Contarini. The panel most likely depicts one of the key scenes from the iconography of St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226), the moment when he received the wounds of the Crucifixion (stigmata) inflicted on Christ during the Passion. This is said to have occurred in the summer of 1224, while the saint was at La Verna, a site in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. Bellini shows St. Francis in contemplation, standing in a large and beautiful landscape. The palms of his hands display the wounds, while the landscape and animals around him highlight his close relationship with the natural world. (Frick)