St Francis Receives the Stigmata

This is a work with high pietistic content, which interprets fully a sort of anti-Mannerist reaction of a religious-moralistic nature. Leaving aside the facile emotivity generated by the emphatic pose of the kneeling saint and the mystical, theatrical smoke which heralds the divine event, the painting is a work of extreme austerity, and avowedly prosaic even from a technical point of view, considering that the artist, breaking with the Tuscan design tradition, executed it in the Venetian style, almost entirely with colour.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 33 minutes): Michael Haydn: St Francis Mass