One of the most accomplished and strikingly original artists of the Lombard seicento was the Tanzio da Varallo, a native of Piedmont. In addition to executing several large fresco commissions for churches in Milan, he produced an impressive number of altarpieces and smaller devotional pictures in a more personalized style. His eclectic approach combined Caravaggio’s trademark naturalism and dramatic use of light and shadow with the eccentric mannerism of Lombard art and the uncompromising naturalism of Piedmontese practice.


Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), the founder of the Franciscan order, is believed to have received the stigmata—the wounds of Christ’s Crucifixion—in 1224 during a retreat on Mount Alverna in the Apennines. It is likely this event that Tanzio evokes here through the naturalistic yet transcendental imagery silvery light glancing off of the figure of the saint and the landscape features of this nocturnal scene. Dated to around 1611–14, the painting of Saint Francis demonstrates Tanzio’s accomplishment as a painter of private devotional images and cabinet pictures. It also reveals his interest in the Northern landscape tradition.


Tanzio was, it seems, acquainted with the hermit landscape paintings created for Cardinal Federico Borromeo and displayed in his Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, which, in addition to featuring Lombard art was especially rich in still life and northern landscape painting, which the Cardinal had begun collecting in Rome in the 1590s; Tanzio may likewise have seen similar northern landscapes in Roman collections when he visited the city in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The cardinal’s writings reveal that appreciated landscape paintings as he believed that they encouraged his contemplation of the magnificence of God’s creation, and the present painting might have been a commission from a patron who admired such northern works and desired something similar for their own collection or for use in private devotional practices. At the same time, Tanzio seems to have looked to prints by the norther engravers Jan and Raphael Sadeler and Cornelis Cort in devising his composition.


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