Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

All three scenes of this predella belong to Franciscan saints. Bernardino, whose name the Siena oratory carried, was a Franciscan friar, so was Anthony of Padua, and this panel shows the founder of the order himself. In 1224, two years before his death, Francis withdrew to pray on La Verna, a rocky mountain in the Tuscan Apennines. There, his early biographers say, a seraph, a six-winged angel bearing the image of the crucified Christ, appeared to him and left the wounds of the crucifixion in his hands, feet and side.

Beccafumi sets him on his knees among sharp grey rocks, arms flung up towards a small red seraph in the sky, with thin rays running down to him. At the right sits a second friar absorbed in a book, the companion who by tradition was with him on the mountain, usually named as Brother Leo.

The altarpiece these panels once stood beneath, Beccafumi's Virgin and Child with saints, is still in the oratory of San Bernardino in Siena.