Saint Francis in Meditation

The church this canvas comes from, San Pietro in Carpineto Romano, a hill town south-east of Rome, was founded in 1609 by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, nephew of the late Pope Clement VIII. The museum dates the painting itself to around 1606. Saint Francis kneels alone in an empty, dark place, with nothing but a rock for the cross to lean on, and looks down at a skull he holds almost tenderly. The museum reads it as an echo of Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane, with the skull taking the place of the cup of suffering, a fitting link for the first saint said to have received Christ's wounds. A nearly identical canvas hangs in the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, and some scholars long took that one for the original. In 2000 the two were restored side by side. The X-rays showed important changes of mind in this figure, typical of a first version, and none in the other. On that evidence the museum holds this to be Caravaggio's own canvas and the Capuchin picture a copy of high quality, a question not every scholar regards as closed.