Bellini, Saint Francis In Ecstasy, c. 1480

We're standing in front of one of my favorite paintings at the Frick Collection. It's Giovanni Bellini's painting from 1480, St. Francis. And it goes by two titles. The Frick tends to call it St. Francis in the Desert. But art historians tend to call it St. Francis in Ecstasy. And that is because Henry Clay Frick himself was a Protestant and really shied away from Catholic subjects. This is one of the few overtly Catholic paintings in the collection. It's really overtly with the beginnings of something that one could say could end up with blood. And what we see is the late medieval founder of the Franciscan order, St. Francis himself, living in isolation. And Francis had been a rich man. Well, there's that great story, the Franciscan legend, that when he was a boy that he threw his expensive clothing at his father in the middle of town. That's right. And decided to live as closely to Christ's life as he could in utter poverty. And in fact, what's represented here is in a sense a gift for his efforts to do that. That is, he's about to receive the stigmata or is in the process of reading it. Now, if this was a medieval painting of this subject, that's right, if this was a medieval rendering or if this was even a Proto-Renaissance painting, we would probably see a little image of Christ up in the sky. And little rays coming down. Little gold rays, one going to each hand and each foot. But what Bellini is doing that's so extraordinary here is he's removing the halos, he's removing all of this divinity, and he's replacing them with the natural worlds. Totally immersed in the naturalism of the early Renaissance. So that one could almost imagine now it's the sun that's illuminating him, that's in a sense giving him that sort of spiritual moment. In a sense it becomes a replacement. And the size of the landscape around him, he's so small in a way. That's such a radical approach for the Renaissance. Totally. Normally the landscape is just large spiritual figures. And here he's small and it's the landscape that occupies. And that's appropriate. For this subject it's appropriate because Francis remains associated with nature. There's so much symbolism in this painting. The most obvious that he's in the wilderness away from the towns which we see, the fortified towns that we see in the background. It's not that he's proximate to that, that he's close, but that he's outside of the confines of the wall by himself. And then he's got his little sort of cloistered area. With the memento mori. The skull. He's got a Bible. And importantly he's got grapevines growing above for the Eucharist. For the wine. There is this beautiful glowing quality. The sky and the light on those buildings in the background is just fabulous. You can feel the weather of this day. It's actually gem-like in its clarity. The color is amazing. And one of the ways that he achieved that is because Bellini is of course associated with Venice. And some of the Venetian painters, that's right, were looking towards the northern tradition of glazing, of putting translucent pigment so that there was this kind of refractive quality and that kind of glow begins to develop. And it's so different from the other. It's so different from the Florentine Renaissance. It's absolutely different. There's no clouds like that in Florence. No, or in Rome. They're sort of general clouds. But here they're very real clouds and very real light. Not only the clarity, but the specificity and the detail. Yes, the detail. We can see this as in a sense a generation beyond Van Eyck, really still influenced by that north because Venice was so much the crossroads of the northern tradition and the Italian tradition. That clarity. It reminds me also of Mantegna. Mantegna was a relative. That's right, of Bellini. That's right. Merit didn't marry Bellini's sister. And Bellini himself came from an important artist family. Look at that mule. There's all kinds of symbolism throughout. It's a little bit like the story of Icarus where there's this momentous thing going on and yet everything in the world just goes on. Oh, the brugal. Oh, the brugal, right. That's right. That everything in the world goes on as normal. It's just a gorgeous painting. A masterpiece for this artist. This is at the very beginning of his career. And we're so lucky to have it in New York. One of the greatest Renaissance paintings in the United States. ♪