荒野中的圣方济各

Bellini worked this panel in Venice around 1475 to 1480. The subject is Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, which he was believed to have taken during a retreat on a mountain in 1224. Almost every other painter of the time staged that moment with a little crucifix in the sky shooting rays down at the saint. Bellini left all that out. Instead the miracle is carried entirely by light, a golden glow pouring in from the upper left that brightens the rocks and pulls Francis forward out of his shelter, arms open, face lifted. Around him Bellini painted a whole living landscape in fine detail, a donkey, a heron, a distant town, a laurel tree bending in the same wind. Henry Clay Frick bought it in 1915, and it hangs in his collection in New York.