圣方济各领受圣痕

For a long time this altarpiece in Trapani hung under the name of a modest Sicilian painter, Vincenzo da Pavia, and few visitors gave it a second look. Then in 1946 the scholar Roberto Longhi argued it was in fact an early Titian, painted around 1525, and a cleaning in the 1950s settled the matter when the master's own signature surfaced beneath the grime. It shows Francis of Assisi struck by the vision that marked his hands and side, out on a hillside at dawn. Titian was still a young man in Venice when he composed it, already handling the light on the saint's robe the way older painters handled gold. The town has kept the picture ever since, in a former Carmelite convent beside its great church.