L'Art en Question 7 : Bellini - St-François dans le Désert

*Art ...*

ArtSleuth

A man

Among rocks

With a town in the background

A picture by Giovanni Bellini

A hero seeking inspiration in a glorious landscape?

Better than that:

the supreme champion of life lived simply and in harmony with nature:

Saint Francis of Assisi ...

… in a landscape touched by the fantastic!

• two suns light the scene:

• one in the direction the saint is looking

• the other in the background

• and the palms of his hands are bleeding

The last recalls a miracle

which Bellini’s predecessors happily gave the full Hollywood treatment:

Celestial beings,

bright light from on high,

gaping wounds.

So why does Bellini tone everything down?

250 years have passed since the death of Saint Francis

This sumptuous picture has been acquired by a group of Venetian magnates…

… one of them a fabulously rich merchant banker:

do they really believe in the poverty preached by the saint?

And does Bellini - Renaissance painter and scholar in one, have doubts concerning miracles

… which subvert the natural order?

Or does he really want to paint a dazzling landscape, with Saint Francis as mere pretext?

*BELLINI – Saint Francis in the desert*

*Not miracle, but landscape?*

Part 1. *Natural miracle*

Is Bellini trying to make the miracle seem natural?

The saint’s holy retreat in the mountains occupies the foreground …

…close to a cave where he has made his home.

Further back, a rural landscape,

separated from the foreground by jagged rocks

and this screen of vegetation

and, behind a quietly flowing river, urban civilisation:

a town ...

…and buildings perched on hilltops,

beneath a peaceful sky

Standing firmly erect in his rough, homespun habit,

the saint is in the world, and yet outside it too,

with his gaze fixed on a strange source of light.

Is it the autumn sun?

Since the saint is either open-mouthed in wonder, or possibly singing,

since this bewildered rabbit has started from its burrow

since the saint has dropped his stick and sandals,

since this foliage is lit from the front ...

although the walls in the distance are in shadow …

…we tend to feel that something less mundane is happening.

Is the angel, the seraph, appearing to Saint Francis?

Legend has it that night turned to day,

to the near-by shepherds’ amazement.

Of course, that might explain why the town is so quiet

- not a soul in sight!

But there’s no physical trace of the angel:

the light in the foreground might come from a comet,

and that in the background from the sun.

But the painter goes even further.

The heart of the miracle was the stigmata,

the five wounds of the crucified Christ,

which Saint Francis received kneeling down.

Here, however, he is standing

- and the wounds have been touched in so lightly that,

on the left foot, they have vanished.

And the wounds are simply marked with blood,

although the saint’s first biographers tell us that his own flesh took on the shape of the nails…

… and the wound in the side,

which distinguished Christ from the thieves crucified with him…

… does not appear in the picture.

Light and perspective make the saint’s stigmatisation *a metaphor: *

he is, as it were,

virtually nailed to this crucifix,

relegated to the edge of the picture.**

In other words, he is no longer singled out by a spectacular manifestation of divine power:

we are reminded of the miracle, but are not necessarily seeing it happen.

The picture’s originality is more a matter of the saint’s posture and relationship with nature.

Is the landscape indeed its real subject?

Part 2. Nature v. town?

There is no river or town near the real Monte Alverna,

the saint’s chief retreat.

And so this is not an actual landscape,

but a figment of Bellini’s imagination!

The town stands for the saint’s former life:

The life of an arrogant “rich kid” from a family of cloth merchants.

The life of the new bourgeoisie who,

with their talent for trade and finance,

are making Italy’s cities wealthy

- and starting to worry about their own salvation.

A life which Saint Francis puts behind him:

he renounces his possessions;

the bridge in the picture is symbolically cut

every knot on his coarse habit represents a vow

- of poverty,

chastity,

obedience - …

… which he clearly honours :

• The only trace of a meal, this simple pitcher,

• The only sign of a church, this handbell,

• His only means of study, this book and parchment.

• A heron as symbol of fidelity to the Church

- or of the old sybaritic lifestyle.

• And the donkey to carry him - and symbolise bodily service,

But the town itself is not demonised:

•the donkey reminds us that Jesus returned to Jerusalem,

•the shepherd that the gospel must be preached to the “lost sheep”…,

Saint Francis seems to be saying that city-dwellers have forgotten the meaning of gratitude.

The light we see is a gift from heaven

As he sings a hymn to his creator, Saint Francis seems to be imitating a bird,

and his body echoes the curve of the laurel bush

But this isn’t the garden of Eden either

- labour is man’s return for nature’s bounty, as he turns:

• a cave into a home,

• a vine into a pergola,

• a fold in the ground into a garden,

• and a spring into a conduit

If we cannot imitate Christ’s *sacrifice *on the cross,

Bellini suggests a life of giving and of prayer *as a modest alternative.*

Building a chapel,

donating a religious painting

- these are some of the good works the rich can perform

in the hope of gaining paradise.

At the time Bellini paints his picture, the Franciscans are setting up special loan agencies - the Monte di Pietà

- to help the poorest of the poor in Italy.

The poverty of Saint Francis has become a *giving-based economic system, *

and is steadily making the Franciscans more powerful.

They control hundreds of buildings in town centres,

and have already given the Church two popes.

So - is Bellini simply their mouthpiece ?

Part 3. The religion of nature

The hallowed landscape is not Bellini’s invention.

Traditionally, it is a stylised background

which indicates that the saint portrayed

is in a *different world from the viewer.*

But interest in landscape as such becomes more marked in Italian and French art

from the start of the XVth century.

This pictorial version of the story of Saint Anthony is an example:

While most of the episodes take place beneath a gilded sky or in a church,

those where the saint is tempted in the desert

are set in a real landscape.

As in the desert scene with Saint Francis:

There is a broken sky

- blue, yellow and white

and the high viewpoint allows us

to explore the setting in depth.

Contemporary Flemish painters

take this mixture of the sacred and profane even further:

Van Eyck puts the Virgin face-to-face with Chancellor Rolin,

who has commissioned the picture.

The landscape in the background

is an idealised image of his territories, which he can then compare

... to an ideal city…

…with the Virgin as its queen.

In spite of the crenellated wall which separates her from the secular world,

she is almost *being used* to convey a political message!

There is, therefore, a risk that landscape may destroy the *necessary distance *

between the profane and the sacred.

In his Saint Francis,

Bellini deploys three separate solutions to the problem.

First solution:

he marks off areas where the supernatural holds sway.

Bellini sometimes uses paved spaces with sturdy balustrades,

... where certain events take place unseen by people in the background,

... [to be translated]

Compare this *transfiguration scene, *

where a ravine protected by a frail wooden barrier

separates us from the mountain where the miracle is taking place.

Here, variations in the terrain serve this separating function.

Variety and precision of detail also make us forget

that the whole scene is imagined:

we feel that we are really seeing the beauties of nature,

a nature so delightful that it seems good

- and so *good *that we feel it was created *for us *

by a benevolent divinity.

Second solution: signal the sanctity of the central figure.

Instead of using the conventional halo …

Bellini invests the saint’s posture with mystery.

That mystery lies in the contrast between an unusually powerful and clearly defined *physical presence*

....which stands out against the pale stone behind it...

… and the outward signs of *spiritual ecstasy:*

he is directly *in front of us, *and yet his attention is *elsewhere. *

Third solution: light.

Bellini applies very thin layers of paint on top of one another,

which creates transparent effects…

but also makes certain surfaces, like the stone, seem luminous:

the underlying bright colours

light them from within.

Bellini’s Saint Francis thus seems

a subtle forerunner of what we now call “fantasy” in literature and film:

in an ordinary natural setting, something in a person’s behaviour,

a brightness in the air

and unexpected details

all suggest the presence of the supernatural.

Next episode: *the Young Knight* by Vittore Carpaccio

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Special thanks - English translation: Vincent Nash

A CED production