Saint Francis of Assisi

In the 1830s the Spanish state suppressed most of the country's religious houses, and the pictures that came out of them were gathered into a new museum in Madrid, the Trinidad, which in 1872 was folded into the Prado. This canvas made that journey. It had hung in a Madrid convent of Poor Clares called la Salutación, known to everyone as Constantinopla, and at the lower right it still carries the mark it picked up along the way, 276 in blue with a T after it. The museum dates it no more closely than the 17th century, and its author line stops at attributed to Ribera. Francis is shown half length in the brown habit, the knotted cord at his waist with a small cross hanging from it, his hands open and turned outward so the stigmata show, his eyes lifted away to one side. A skull and a rosary lie on the ledge beside him.