Saint Francis of Assisi
Giovanni da Milano (c. 1320-1369) · c. 1350-1375
Saint Francis stands full length against a gold ground in the brown habit of his order, tied with the knotted cord, and shows the wounds of the stigmata on his hands. The panel is tall and narrow, the shape of a side panel from a polyptych. The saint's face is grave and finely modelled, and the light falls softly on the folds of the habit, with a sense of volume that sets this painter apart from his Florentine contemporaries.
Giovanni da Milano, born near Como in Lombardy, worked in Florence in the middle decades of the fourteenth century and brought a northern Italian feeling for texture and shadow to the tradition of Giotto. The museum dates the panel to the third quarter of the century and identifies it as the right hand element of a polyptych whose other parts include an Annunciation in Pisa, a Saint Anthony Abbot in Williamstown in the United States; it may have been painted for the church of San Torpè at Pisa or for the Badia in Florence. It came with the Campana collection in eighteen sixty one, then hung in Bordeaux from eighteen sixty three to nineteen fifty five.
Did You Know? The panel spent almost a century in Bordeaux on loan before it came back to the Louvre in nineteen fifty five.
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