Page 63 - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione - Visions and Ecstasy

hillside in the background take up still more of the

painting’s area, reaching the height of the saint’s waist

and completing his enclosure. A generic rise of ground

with emblematic vegetation in the preceding altarpiece

now seems a specific place and a surrounding nature.

Second, the composition has been carefully organised

and integrated with a calculus that still owes to the

lessons of Poussin and classical style in Rome. The

diagonal of the foreground sets the structural tone as

in Osimo, but with the saint’s left arm and the hillside

now seconding it. The Crucifix, however, interrupts

that ascent to assert another, steeper diagonal that

reaches its isoscelean counterpart, along the saint’s

back and hood, at the point where his face meets

Christ.As subtle as it is meaningful, this inscription of

shape within vector represents both a mastery of the

kind of calculus and a refinement of the specific

structure that are more enunciated in the San Luca

Nativity. Finally, the fused brushwork and smooth

modulation of Van Dyck’s paint handling, a regular

aspect of Castiglione’s work and pronounced in the

Fig. 19 G.B.CASTIGLIONE, Head of a Old Man Facing Right, lower part of the Osimo altarpiece, are here overlaid
from the ‘Small Oriental Heads’, Etching, Bartsch 34. with the fine, blanketing impasto and mutually
inflected textures of Strozzi and, at their source, Giulio

Cesare Procaccini. No less than the refinements of

compositional structure, the rhyme of striated pigment across the patch of bright sun, highlights in the saint’s

habit, and the body of Christ lends pictorial unity.

Collectively, these adjustments elevate the work’s inherent visual interest far beyond that of a mere excerpt
or repetition. More important, they impart a coherence that underscores its conception and identity as an
autonomous work. By the same token, they not only accommodate but elaborate upon the change of
iconography, from the iconic or emblematic of Osimo’s Saint Francis, or Strozzi’s later versions, toward the

63