Page 28 - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione - Visions and Ecstasy

Francis' Visions and Ecstasy, should record our friendship and also our professional relationship. One can only
wish that there were more enthusiastic collectors just like her today with such taste and not just those who only
follow fashion or a trend for ContemporaryArt. It therefore seems totally appropriate that after a space of thirty
two years one of the most seminal paintings from our first exhibition, Important Italian Baroque paintings 1600 –
1700, should return to the fold rather than be exposed to the auctioneer’s block.Thus it was that I used every
endeavour to ensure that Castiglione’s masterpiece of St Francis in Ecstasy should appear in these pages, back
with the gallery rather than in a mundane auction catalogue. Some will, no doubt, accuse me of indulging in a
Proustian fantasy,‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’.To such critics I would quote from one of Martial’s Epigrams16
‘Living double, is he who also knows how to enjoy the past!’ It is also coincidentally appropriate that this catalogue
should appear at precisely the moment that a new pope is installed - Francis. Basia would have approved!

In Bonaventure’s Life of St Francis17 he highlights a mystical experience Francis had in the beginning of
his conversion.The experience is an important key to Francis’ style of prayer – a style filled with burning
affection and love.The incident happened after he had found God by embracing a leper he met along the way.
Bonaventure tells us that shortly after this episode, Francis ‘began to seek out solitary places [where] he
prayed incessantly with unutterable groaning.... One day while Francis was praying in a secluded spot and
had become totally absorbed in God through his extreme fervour, Jesus Christ appeared to him nailed to the
Cross. Francis’ soul melted at the sight, writes Bonaventure ‘and the memory of Christ’s passion was so
impressed on the innermost recesses of his heart that from that hour, whenever Christ’s crucifixion came to
his mind, he could scarcely contain his tears and his sighs…’.The vision of God’s all out love for him – even
to the point of dying on the Cross – conveyed itself so vividly to Francis that he began serving the lepers‘with
a feeling of intimate devotion,’ often kissing them ‘with great compassion.’ More than this other writers tell
us that Francis was so overwhelmed by Christ’s great love for him that the little saint traversed the countryside
weeping and proclaiming: “Love is not loved! Love is not loved!” By this he was trying to convey the message
to everyone he met that God is madly in love with each one of us but that we fail to respond with the same

16. Martial (MarcusValerius Martialis) 40 AD - c.102-104AD, Twelve Books of Epigrams. Since Martial was born on March the first,
as indeed am I, the quotation seemed doubly apposite. I am grateful to Larry Nichols for drawing my attention to this quotation
which is also on a placque on a house in Maastricht.

17. Saint Bonaventure,‘The Life of St Francis of Assisi’ from the Legenda Santi Francisci of S.Bonaventure, edited, with a preface by Henry
Howard,Archbishop ofWestminster, London, 1868. I have included the skull orVanitas from the Castiglione at the foot ofThe
Prayer Before the Crucifix on p.3 as a reference to Golgotha 'the place of a skull' or Calvariae Locus.

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