San Francisco en meditación

For a long time nobody was sure this was a Caravaggio at all. It appears nowhere in the documents of his life, and when the historian Roberto Longhi looked at it in 1943 he thought it was probably a good imitation. Then in 1951 another scholar, Denis Mahon, argued it was the real thing, painted around 1606, and a cleaning in 1986 all but settled the case. Saint Francis kneels in near-darkness, cradling a skull and staring into it, a single fall of light picking out his hands and hooded face. One recent idea is that a Cremonese churchman, Benedetto Ala, who protected Caravaggio during his troubles in Rome, commissioned it. The painting reached this Cremona museum in 1879, given by a marquis of the same Ala family.