Between Form and Representation: The Frick St Francis
By Emanuele Lugli
Art History, Vol.32:1 (2010)
Abstract: The subject of Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis, currently housed at the Frick Collection in New York, has perplexed viewers for more than five centuries. Scholars have suggested several possible texts, but none of these has been proven unequivocally to be Bellini’s reference. Instead of proposing a new written source, this paper focuses on the formal aspects of the painting. It will thus appear that Bellini bent the representational conventions of his time to produce a work of pictorial intelligence. The formal quality of the Frick St Francis is assessed through an analysis of the laurel tree in the left of the painting. Overlooked by many, the tree is the key element of the Frick panel. It is the tree that justifies the variety of exegetical readings, exemplifying as it does a conflation of forms and an experienced handling of visual effects.
Introduction: Discussion of the Frick St Francis tends to focus on its subject matter. Scholars do not agree on what it represents. The problem, which has become an impasse, with scholars either avoiding the issue or naively suggesting new titles, is not a recent one, as it is not caused by the application of different methods of interpretation. Instead, the conditions of the problem appeared with the painting’s very first steps into art-historical existence.
The discussion can be distilled to one central disagreement between two opposing ways of interpreting the painting. The first was fully expressed in 1525, when the Venetian patrician Marc’Antonio Michiel wrote the earliest record of the painting: ‘The oil painting of St Francis in the desert was made by Zuan Bellino. It was undertaken by him for M. Zuan Michiel and features an admirably polished and detailed landscape.’ According to Michiel, St Francis is not doing anything in this painting; he simply is in the desert.
Within Quattrocento Italian painting, not doing anything but simply ‘being’ occurs in specific types of pictures. Among others, these include half-bust portraits, standing saints and allegories. Several times Michiel’s inventory, like other contemporary accounts, registers the paintings not as supports for represented figures, but as the figures themselves. Records such as ‘la tela del Christo che laua li piedi alli discipuli‘ (‘the canvas depicting Christ washing his apostles’ feet’) alternate with notes such as ‘el Christo morto sopra el sepolcro’ (‘the dead Christ on the sepulchre’), where mention of the support is suppressed. These descriptions reveal an approach to pictures in which real presence and virtual presence are not completely distinct categories. Of course the matter is more complex than simply considering a picture to be the equivalent of the figure it represents, but such descriptions nonetheless speak to the success of these paintings as mimetic reproductions. Furthermore, they record only the name of the figures, and overlook every other element of the image. Considered non-essential, these elements are relegated to the rank of attributes, mere accessories to the main figure. Even gestures may fall victim to this interpretive regime, and actions such as reading a letter or holding a child are interpreted as no more than standard means of characterizing learnedness or motherhood.
In the fifteenth century this approach to painting acquired a nuance significant to the present argument. Detailed, varied, settings began to emerge behind the figures, in contrast to the traditional plain backgrounds, and this demanded attention. These pictures were not recorded as simply depicting being, but as depicting being somewhere. Interpretive emphasis – the perceived reason for the painting – remained, however, on the figure. Versions of St Jerome in the Desert, St Augustine in his Study, and, according to Michiel, our St Francis in the Wilderness, are all examples of this shifting attitude.
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