Saint Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini

Saint Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini

A man stepping into the light

Francis has come out of his hermitage and stopped. His sandals are left behind him at the desk; his arms are open at his sides, palms forward; his head is tilted back into a light that pours in from the upper left of the picture and strikes nothing else so hard. Whether this is the moment of the stigmata is still argued over — the wounds are hard to see, and there is no crucified seraph in the sky as tradition requires — but it hardly matters. The subject is a man overcome.

The landscape as a prayer

Everything around him is painted with the same devotion as the saint. A grey heron stands in the middle distance, a donkey grazes, a rabbit looks out from a crevice at the lower left; there are laurel and vine, a walled town, distant towers and a sky that deepens from white to blue. Bellini gives the rocks the texture of rock and the leaves the weight of leaves. It reads as the created world of the Canticle of the Sun — Brother Sun, Sister Water — rather than as a backdrop.

Venice and the new medium

Bellini was among the first Venetian painters to use oil glazes over tempera, learning from Netherlandish example, and this is one of the pictures where the technique pays off. The light has a warmth and depth that tempera alone could not give it.

Where it hangs

The panel belongs to the Frick Collection in New York, where it has been since 1915, and measures 124 by 142 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 10,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 66 inches on its longest side.

Sources: The Frick Collection, New York · Wikidata Q3947115 · Wikimedia Commons