Meet St. Francis, who’s in the middle of receiving a…um…complicated divine visitation. This wealthy young party lover and man about town gave it all up to live a more meaningful life and lead others to embrace self-sacrifice, love nature, and encourage peace.
In today’s episode we find out how his spiritual devotion led to this rather mixed blessing and why he’s one of the most popular saints.
If you want to follow along, you can find it at here on the Frick Collection’s site.
Photo of St. Francis in the gallery is here.
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas:
“Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs
Episode music:
“Byrd O Magnum Mysterium” by William Byrd. Performed by Ensemble Morales
https://musopen.org/music/10537-o-magnum-mysterium/
“Ale and Anecdotes” by Darren Curtis | https://www.darrencurtismusic.com/
Music promoted on https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Artwork information
https://collections.frick.org/objects/39/st-francis-in-the-desert
https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/cocktails_curator/bellinis_st_francis_desert
St. Francis info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi#Character_and_legacy
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Francis-of-Assisi#ref2420
In a New Light : Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” Rutherglen, Susannah et al. New York: The Frick Collection in association with D Giles Limited, London, 2014.
“Cocktails with A Curator” St. Francis in the Desert
https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/cocktails_curator/bellinis_st_francis_desert
“Canticle of the Creatures”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
Meaning of stigmata
https://www.franciscantradition.org/blog/78-feast-of-the-stigmata-of-saint-francis
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson and welcome to a special in real life travel edition of A Long Look!
[traffic] Today I’m at Frick Madison in New York City! And this visit is really personal. During the dark days of 2020, the Frick created a fantastic weekly video series called Cocktails with a Curator. Each episode would feature the story of a work in their collection and a cocktail to go with it. Part art history and part travelogue, they were a much needed bright spot. So I swore I’d visit as soon as it felt safe. [traffic out]
The second reason for this little pilgrimage was the chance to see the collection in a whole new way. The original Frick mansion is undergoing a major renovation, so highlights from the collection are on display at the old Whitney Museum a few blocks away.
Now, you gotta understand how weird this is. The Frick Collection mansion on Fifth Avenue was home to Henry Clay Frick. He was a very, very wealthy guy who made a fortune in steel. And he spent a lot of that fortune building an impressive collection of European artworks and decorative arts, including Asian ceramics and French porcelain which he used to fill his opulent home, which was built around 1914. It’s three stories tall with a pearly white exterior and classical attached columns and tall arched windows.
So you’d walk into rooms with paintings in gold frames hanging on walls covered with dark wood paneling or richly covered fabric. And bronze figurines and colorful vases would be arranged on heavy ornately carved furniture that was the height of style at the time. It’s all really stunning but kind of over the top, shouting wealth and status.
But the old Whitney building is a completely different story. It is a stark, no frills, experimental building built in the 1960s as a home for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s equally experimental art collection. Imagine a big, square, grey four-level wedding cake turned upside down and you’ll get the idea.
But here the works are cut loose from their usual elaborate surroundings and we can see them for themselves. It’s like hearing a solo album from a guy in one of your favorite bands! They’ve got a lot of their stars here, like Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez, Vermeer, and Fragonard.
MUSIC
Anyway, today I’m sharing with you one of my favorites, St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/francis. This’ll take you to the Frick site where you can click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
First, you walk into a large room with very dark grey walls and a single wooden bench with a black padded seat. Cool morning light comes through a trapezoidal window across from you and to your right, is the glowing St. Francis. This large oil painting’s almost square, roughly 4 ft by 5 ft. and was painted between 1475-80.
A slender man in a beige monk’s robe with a knotted rope belt stands near the center of the scene, bathed in warm, golden light from the upper left. He faces our left and He has a lightly tanned angular face covered with five o-clock shadow and short thinning hair around a bald spot on the top of his head.
He’s leaning back with his hands outstretched on either side as he looks up toward the light with wide eyes and his mouth hanging open. One bare foot steps forward a little.
He stands on a ledge sticking out from a rocky pale mint-green cliff that rises sharply from the lower left and climbs behind him to the upper right corner. Weeds and ivy sprout from the crevices and the top is carpeted with pine-green grass and a few saplings. At the foot of the cliff just behind Francis is a stone garden bed filled with plants. To the right of that is the narrow mouth of a cave with a short fence across it made of crisscrossing vertical tree branches. A trellis draped with grapevines extends towards us from the cave, forming a little patio where there’s a wooden desk with a tilted top that has a skull and burgundy book perched on it. A pair of sandals lies at the foot of the desk, like they were just kicked off. As I looked more closely I could see a very tall thin wooden cross with a crown of thorns hung on it.
On the left side of the scene, is a slender tree with a high canopy of pointy leaves that towers over Francis and grows off the top edge. Its trunk bends slightly about halfway up and that gold light illuminates the center of the leaves which fan outward. It almost looks like the light is pushing the branches back.
Beyond the tree and cliff, in the middle distance, a donkey and grey heron stand on a grassy plateau studded with bare trees that overlooks brown fields below. At the far edge of those fields is a shepherd standing among his flock who seems to look in our direction. Finally in the background, are the towers and spires of a walled town clustered at the foot of gently sloping tree-covered hills that lead up to a fortress. The sand-colored buildings have brick-red or olive-green roofs and also glow in that warm light. Stretching across all of this is a stunning, sapphire-blue sky with scattered bands of white clouds. It is seriously breathtaking. A few jagged golden clouds float in the upper left, near the source of that light.
This painting definitely requires a long look because there’s lots going on with Francis. First I notice small red dots in the palms of his hands and a very faint mark on his foot. A little cinnamon-brown bunny pops its head out from the garden wall below his far hand and in the lower left is a bird with a long black beak and red breast sitting under a small water spout.
MUSIC
St. Francis started out Francesco di Pietro di Bernandone and during the Middle Ages in Assisi, a town in central Italy. He was the son of a wealthy family and by all accounts, was a charming, handsome young guy who liked good food, stylish clothes and a great party!
Until he suffered the traumatic experience of being taken captive during a war and getting really ill. This made him reevaluate his life. After he was released, he began to have visions of Christ and spent time among the sick and poor, all of which inspired him to give up his worldly possessions and live a life of chastity and poverty and spiritual devotion. He became a wandering preacher spreading ideas of penance, brotherly love and peace.
As he wandered, he found other men who wanted to do the same thing, so he started their own order, the Franciscans. He also worked with a young noblewoman named Clare from Assisi to found an order for women called the Poor Clares. Both orders still exist and there’s actually a Franciscan monastery here in DC with beautiful gardens.
The order became really popular really fast and that meant loads of new people and their money who wanted to organize things and maybe not wander so much. Basically it grew so large it started to break away from his original idea of just a group living a humble, spiritual life. It was now turning into the more worldly life Francis had rebelled against all those years ago.
So Francis got pretty discouraged and one day went on a spiritual retreat up to a mountain called La Verna. While he prayed for inspiration, he had a vision of an angel coming to him who gave him the stigmata, the wounds Christ got when he was crucified. That’s what those marks are on his hands and foot. Now, usually this scene would show the angel hanging on a cross and zapping Francis with golden rays. But it seems Bellini chose to suggest this instead with just the light. I’ll be honest, the reasons he received these wounds are kind of complicated, so I’ll include a link the show notes where you can find an explanation.
Francis is one of the most popular Catholic saints because of his deep love for people and nature. He believed nature is a reflection of God and considered every part of the natural world to be his brothers and sisters. He even wrote about this in poems like the Canticle of the Creatures where he praises God for “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth.” There even a legend that has him preaching to birds! So this is why Bellini includes the critters, flowers, and trees.
And, if you’re confused about this scene being called a desert, it’s because when Bellini painted this a desert didn’t always mean big, hot, sandy place, it also meant a wilderness like this, where nature was free to do its thing and a guy could escape civilization for a while.
I love that the Frick chose to display this painting by itself with this soft light and solitary bench. It definitely felt like a space for contemplation. Kind of reminds me of the rothko room at the Phillips Collection here in DC. And the other cool thing is, the way they have it hung, the light from the window comes in from the left, just like the light on Francis! I’ll post a link in the show notes to a photo of the gallery, so you can see how cool it is!
MUSIC
Well, I want to thank you for joining me on my little New York pilgrimage and I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
If you’d like to learn more about the Frick, head over to frick.org.
You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. If you don’t want to miss an episode, you can find player links on the site or just hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you listen to podcasts!
Thanks for listening!