Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

In September 1224, two years before his death, Francis of Assisi was praying on La Verna, a mountain in the Tuscan Apennines, when, by the accounts of his first followers, a seraph appeared to him and left in his hands, feet and side the wounds of the crucified Christ. His companion, Brother Leo, was with him on the mountain.

Barocci painted this canvas in 1594 and 1595, the same years he was working on a large altarpiece of the same subject for the Capuchins of Urbino, a strict reform branch of the Franciscans. The smaller picture took a quieter road. In 1714 the Floreria Apostolica, the office that furnished the papal palaces, bought it from an abbot named Francesco Bini, and for more than two centuries it hung in the rooms of the Apostolic Palace. It entered the picture gallery in July 1932, the year the present Pinacoteca building opened, and the museum's catalogue lists the painter under his family name, Federico Fiori, known as Barocci.