Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (van Eyck)

Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata is the name given to two unsigned paintings completed around 1428–1432 that art historians usually attribute to the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck.

The paintings show a famous incident from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is shown kneeling by a rock as he receives the stigmata of the crucified Christ on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet.

[4] Anselm may have inherited the paintings from his father Pieter or uncle Jakob, who had travelled to Jerusalem on pilgrimage about 50 years earlier, returning to Ghent around 1427 or 1428.

In the early 1470s Sandro Botticelli, Verrochio, Filippino Lippi and Giovanni Bellini each produced variations of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata that included motifs from van Eyck's version, especially evident in the rendering of the rocky background.

[14] The small Philadelphia panel is painted with oil on parchment (vellum);[15] a reconstructed red vermilion border surrounds the image – it is similar to those seen in contemporary illuminated manuscripts.

[1] Others have taken this as an indication of a less experienced and weaker workshop painter, but Borchert draws a similarity to two works accepted as van Eyck originals.

In the "Adoration of the Mystic Lamb of God" panel of the c. 1432 Ghent Altarpiece, the prophets kneel in a similar way with their feet placed awkwardly behind them.

[23] The wounds on Francis's hands and feet are realistically portrayed; the cuts are not overly deep or dramatic and lack supernatural elements such as beams of light.

The representation of Christ in the guise of a seraph with three pairs of wings[20] is an unusually fantastical element for van Eyck's normally reserved sensibility.

Holland Cotter described this disconnect as appearing as if Christ's "mystical vision were somehow aural rather than visual experience, and [Francis] was holding himself absolutely still to catch its distant sound".

[24] The Francis paintings seem to be early experiments with landscape; the painter places rocks in the mid-ground, solving the problem of how to transition from foreground to background; a similar resolution is found in the lower-right wing of the Ghent Altarpiece.

[11] Behind the figures a panoramic mountain landscape soars to the sky; the mid-ground contains a variety of rocks and spikes, including strata of fossiliferous layers.

[26] As with the New York Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych, the mountains are capped with snow, which van Eyck may have seen during his visits to Italy and Spain, where he crossed the Alps and Pyrenees.

Despite the early to mid-15th century date, the conservator Kenneth Bé observes that, to modern geologists "the details, colors, textures, and morphologies in Van Eyck's rendering of rocks yield a plethora of scientifically accurate information".

The mid-ground contains a boulder with a crescent-shaped form that could only have arisen from the rock face "intersecting the fossils to reveal cross sections of the shells in side profile", according to Bé.

[27] It closely resembles the background of the Rolin panel, which has undergone much deeper attention from scholars, with several identifications made with structures in Jerusalem, including the Mosque of Omar, known to van Eyck through second-hand textual and visual descriptions.

[33] The small carpet of white flowers in the foreground is reminiscent of those in the Ghent Altarpiece's central panel;[34] behind Francis are dwarf palms.

Van Eyck eliminated the dramatic pose and rays of light causing the stigmata, which according to James Snyder, are generally "essential features of the iconography".

[47] In 1926 he recorded: "When it came to me, the panel was considerably larger at the top, and dull opaque sky concealed the join where the extra piece had been added on to satisfy some owner who did not appreciate the compressed composition of the original.

Restorers discovered an irretrievably lost inscription on a rock adjacent to the seraph-Christ, and evidence of earlier overpainting of one of Leo's feet.

Working under ultraviolet light, paint from earlier restorations was removed, uncovering lost colours and landscape details, including the snow-capped mountains and birds of prey on the upper left.

[50] Research in the late 19th century lead to what Rishel describes as "one of the thorniest conundrums in the study of Early Netherlandish art", as efforts were made to establish authorship and date the panels in terms of precedence.

[53] Based on the perceived "faulty proportions" of the figures, Ludwig von Baldass suggested a date early in van Eyck's career, around 1425.

He notes how the landscape and individual elements are similar to Hubert van Eyck's style, but that the close observation of nature reveals Jan's hand.

She bases her supposition on the fact that van Eyck's employer Philip the Bold sent him to Portugal in the late 1420s; he would have been unavailable for a commission until his return in 1430.

Furthermore, the landscape details, which correlate to van Eyck's work of the period, combined with the return from pilgrimage late in the 1420s of the Adornes brothers (who may have commissioned the two paintings), suggest a completion date of about 1430.

This was largely because the jagged peaks in the distance have been added to and altered to Patinir's trademark depiction of the distinctive landscape of Dinant, his hometown.

[59] Unlike Borchert, Luber thinks that The Agony evidences his early experiments with perspective, as he began to resolve the transition between foreground and background, by placing the fence in the mid-ground, a device found in the St Francis through the positioning of the rocks.

[60] Luber says the underdrawings in the miniature are similar to those in the St Francis paintings, and stylistically typical of those in van Eyck's later work, an important factor when considering attribution.

[16] There are three possibilities: the panels are van Eyck originals; they were completed by workshop members after his death from one of his underdrawings; or they were created by a highly talented follower compiling a pastiche of Eyckian motifs.