Page 66 - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione - Visions and Ecstasy

Fig. 21 G.B.CRESPI called IL CERANO Battista Crespi in particular. Cerano had been a favourite of his
Madonna dei Miracoli of Santa Maria presso region’s Franciscans from his earliest works, notably his first
San CelsoVenerated by Saint Francis and San Carlo altarpiece in Milan, the so-called Votive of the Franciscan Saints
Borromeo, Galleria Sabauda,Turin. for the Capuchin church of the Immaculate Conception.30
Later, effectively the official artist of Federico Borromeo’s
Milan, he invented much of the iconography of San Carlo, with
which Franciscan imagery is intertwined, and a virtual
taxonomy of devotional images of the saint. One variation, with
Francis full-length, in profile, and bearing a cross, derives from
the altarpiece of the Madonna dei Miracoli of Santa Maria presso
San CelsoVenerated by Saint Francis and San Carlo Borromeo atTurin
(Fig. 21), so parallel to the relation of the present picture to
the altarpiece for Osimo.31 In the most subjective and intense
variation, in the Brera, the saint appears half-length, thinly laid
in over a dark ground with coruscating accents of white, ravaged
flesh passing into ecstatic spirit (Fig. 22a).32 Emblematic of
Milanese spirituality between the great plagues, this variation
saw innumerable versions (Fig. 22b Milan, Castello Sforzesco),
determining future imagery of the saint in Lombardy and
doubtless reaching Liguria. An inventory of Giovan Carlo Doria’s
paintings compiled before 1621 records no less than eighteen
works by Cerano including item 355,‘Hun Santo Francesco del
Cerano…’33 More than an earlier Genoese response to Milanese
style, Gioacchino Assereto’s numerous versions of a stark,
distorted Saint Francis in ecstasy demonstrate the influence of

31. Turin, Galleria Sabauda, inv. no. 464; ibid., cat. no. 87. Rosci records two derivations, one seemingly autograph in a Milanese
private collection and a more elaborate version by Cerano’s brother and follower,Ortensio, in aTurin private collection (ibid.,
cat. no. 89).

32. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, inv. no. 1006; ibid., cat. 152. Rosci remarks that ‘rimane questo il prototipo delle immagini ‘di
pietà privata’ del secondo decennio, di grandissima fortuna, documentata dal numero di copie e derivazioni’, some of which
he describes and illustrates.

33. Genoa 2004, pp. 192-95

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