Saint James of the Marches

James of the Marches died in Naples in November 1476, a Franciscan preacher in his eighties who had worked as far from Italy as Hungary and Bosnia. Crivelli signed and dated this tall panel the following year, while that memory was still fresh in the towns of the Marche. The two small figures kneeling at the friar's feet are donors whose names have not come down to us. The painted inscription already calls him Beatus, blessed. Local devotion ran well ahead of Rome, which declared him a saint only in 1726. He raises a finger toward the round tablet hanging beside his face, marked with the letters IHS for the name of Jesus. That emblem had been spread through Italian towns by his teacher, Bernardino of Siena, and it is why this friar was sometimes mistaken for Bernardino himself.