Stigmata of Saint Francis

Francis of Assisi died in 1226, and within a generation someone in Tuscany painted this small panel of the moment that set him apart from every saint before him. Two years before his death, on the bare rock of La Verna in the Casentino hills, he is said to have seen a winged seraph fixed to a cross and to have come away with the wounds of Christ marked on his own body. Here he kneels on that stony ground, arms open, face lifted, while thin rays run down from the seraph to his hands and his side. Part of what makes the panel matter is that it survived at all. In 1266 the Franciscan order, meeting in Paris, ordered older images of Francis destroyed in favour of a single approved likeness, and most early ones vanished. This is among the oldest depictions of the stigmata to come through that purge, painted in tempera and gold while people who had known him were still alive.