Date: 08-10-2000
Owning Institution: Louvre, France
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     Renaissance  Middle Ages & Earlier    

Last Wednesday was the anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, so this week’s picture is an altarpiece by Giotto di Bondone and his workshop depicting St Francis Receiving the Stigmata. It was painted 700 years ago.

The artist may have known Thomas of Celano’s vivid account of Francis’s stigmatisation, which occurred during a 40-day fast in the mountain retreat of La Verna:

“Francis saw in a divine vision a man standing over him, like a six-winged seraph, his hands spread, and his feet joined, and fixed to the cross. Of the wings, two were stretched over his head, two were extended as though to fly, and two wrapped round the whole body. Seeing these things, the blessed servant of the Most High was filled with the greatest amazement, but could not understand what the vision might mean. Alternately he was filled with joy and sorrow, and while he was not able to attain any comprehension of the vision, and its strangeness filled his heart, the marks of nails started to appear on his hands and feet, just as he had seen them shortly before on the crucified man above him.”

Surprised at prayer, Giotto’s statuesque Francis seems mesmerised by the miraculous apparition in the sky above him. The image of Christ, enfolded by the seraph, fixes the saint with a solemn gaze. Rays of light shoot from the wounds of His Passion to the selfsame points on Francis’s passionate, adoring body. The saint’s brow is furrowed, suggesting that Giotto meant to show the moment when, as Celano wrote, the vision’s “strangeness filled his heart”.

In accordance with the pictorial conventions of the time, Francis has been depicted on a considerably larger scale than his surroundings. Kneeling in reverence, he nonetheless towers over the pair of toy-like buildings perched among the rocks beside him. The fertile, craggy setting of La Verna has been reduced to a stageprop mountain from which five simplified trees sprout. Beneath the saint’s feet, three other episodes from his legend unfold, but by contrast with the principal scene they are like miniatures. Here too, smaller scale indicates lesser importance. The stigmatization is unequivocally shown to be the central, culminating event of Francis’s life. He had devoted himself to the imitation of Christ and here was the godgiven stamp of his blessedness. It gave him, among his followers, an almost divine status: “Alter Christus”, the other Christ, they called him.

Sceptics and rationalists tend to think of stigmatisation as a pious fraud. In Francis’s own lifetime it was muttered that one of his companions had hammered nails through his hands and feet. Some believe that Giotto’s depiction of the scene accidentally hints at a different means of deception. Noting the laser-like beams of light in the picture, they speculate that the notoriously short-sighted saint could have used his reading glass to magnify the rays of the sun and burn holes into his own flesh.

Other, more charitable theories also abound. In 1987 Joanne Schatzlein and Dr Daniel Sulmasy suggested that Francis, who spent much time in the company of lepers, may himself have been suffering from leprosy. They were excited by the discovery that his remains, preserved in Assisi, lack the normal number of fingers. But the saint’s biographer Adrian House pointed out that the fingers were probably cut off post mortem, to be kept as relics. Refining Schatzlein’s and Sulmasy’s medical diagnosis, House believes lymph node tuberculosis should not be ruled out.

It is doubtless sensible to keep an open mind when it comes to an event that occurred several centuries ago among a community of religious fanatics half way up a mountain in the middle of nowhere. But it has to be said that the old idea that God was responsible has taken something of a beating. Even the Catholic Church would seem to have its doubts. In 1960 the Vatican Council replaced what had previously been The Feast of St Francis’s Stigmatisation with a simple and distinctly low-key “day of commemoration” - possibly in response to advances in biblical archaeology. In the early 1950s, by the somewhat grisly method of bolting freshly amputated arms to a board and then attaching heavy weights to them, the French surgeon Pierre Barbet had shown that it was almost impossible to crucify a man successfully if the nails were driven through his palms. To support the body’s weight, they had to be driven through a small point known as Destot’s space where the base of the hand joins the wrist. Barbet’s research, published in his book A Doctor at Calvary, suggested that most western artists have depicted the Crucifixion inaccurately. It also suggested that the wounds on Francis’s body duplicated those that he had seen on bodies in art, not those once actually experienced by the body of Jesus Christ.

This does not necessarily prove that Francis was a fraud. Modern medical journals often report unexplained “psychogenic purpuras”, while the annals of the nineteenth-century hypnotists are full of intriguing cases of suggestibility. Dr Rybalkin of St Petersburg wrote of a young subject, K, whom he persuaded under hypnosis to touch a metal stove. K was told he had burned himself and angry red blisters formed on his arm. But the stove was unlit, and cold. During the 1920s a Swiss physician, Dr Charles Baudouin, treated a woman whose child had narrowly escaped decapitation by a metal chimney draw-plate: “the mother received such a shock that a flushing erythematous circle formed around her neck…” He christened the phenomenon “dermographism” and defined it succinctly: “an image existing in the subject’s mind becomes outlined on the skin”.

When Francis was young he believed that a particular painting of Jesus, in the little church of San Damiano, came to life and spoke to him. He dated his vocation from that moment, keeping Christ’s image forever in his mind’s eye. His body may well have developed the wounds on which he so continually brooded. It seems appropriate that a great artist such as Giotto should have been commissioned to paint this particular subject. Its true theme is, perhaps, the compelling power that a work of art – an image – can exert over mind and body.