Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata
Ca. 1510. Oil on panel.Room 058
Saint Francis is kneeling on the grassy ground dotted with blue and white flowers, among which strawberries and plantain are recognisable. Rapt in prayer, he contemplates a vision of the Crucifixion that has appeared up above in the form of the Seraphic Christ surrounded by six coloured wings. In keeping with the iconographic tradition, Brother Leo, sitting in front of the saint, is dozing off and does not witness the miracle. The background landscape is compositionally very elaborate. On the left two trees counterbalance the rocks. Between both masses, above the ain figures, a landscape view opens up of a river with a city, where a bridge and several monumental buildings are visible, including a Gothic cathedral. The city has plausibly been identified as Dinant, as the collegiate church of Our Lady beside the river and the characteristic rocky crag topped with a castle, still visible today, are recognisable.
The work is based on the two versions of the same subject attributed to Jan van Eyck. One of them, on panel, is in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin and the other, of similar importance, greatly resembling it only smaller in size and painted on parchment mounted on wood, is in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, inv. 314). The Prado work is not a direct copy of either of the two known versions of Van Eyck’s original, those in Turin and Philadelphia.
In general, this panel is executed with technical skill in places but is not very elaborate, painted almost hurriedly. Nevertheless, using only a few painting devices the artist achieves a very laudable overall result based on a recognisable model: Van Eyck’s work. That is perhaps the feature that it has in common with other paintings by the Master of Hoogstraten and that Friedländer identified as a basis for attributing it to him. When defining the characteristics of the oeuvre of this master created by him, he referred directly to a ‘spare and tentative’ formal idiom.
Until the Master of Hoogstraten is better defined, the elements described and these comparisons do not allow us to rule out a link between the artist who produced the paintings commonly grouped together under this conventional name and the artist, painters or workshop who made the Prado work. Whatever the case, this Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata illustrates to what extent interest in owning Eyckian paintings through repetitions of the Bruges artist’s most famous compositions lingered on for years, becoming combined with other pictorial interests in the early 1500s, such as achieving much more elaborate depictions of landscape
Pérez Preciado, José Juan, Fifteenth-century netherlandish painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado. Catalogue raisonné, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2024, p.204-211 nº.23
