Saint Francis in the Wilderness

In 1956 Bologna held a large exhibition of the Carracci, the family of painters who had worked in the city in the 1580s, and it showed for the first time a Saint Francis from the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, presented as Annibale's. The composition matched this canvas exactly, and the size nearly so. From then on the Corsini picture was treated as a copy from his workshop.

A restoration discussed in 1996 turned that round. Looking at the cleaned canvas, the scholars Denis Mahon and Stephen Pepper concluded from the quality of the paint, the modelling and the finely graded light that the Roman picture is the original and the Venetian one a later version by a gifted pupil. They dated it to 1585 or 1586, before Annibale left Bologna for Rome.

Francis is absorbed before the crucifix among the rocks of La Verna, the Tuscan mountain where he received the stigmata, his face creased with weeping, with a skull and books beside him, the usual tools of meditation. The museum reads the plants and animals as well. The brambles recall the crown of thorns, and the salamander, which people believed could survive fire and so death itself, stands for Christ.

The canvas was already with the Corsini before 1730, when Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini became Pope Clement XII, and in 1754 it was relined on good new canvas because, as the receipt puts it, it had become very hard.