Saint François en extase

Saint Francis in Ecstasy, attributed to Rubens with a date of 1700, belongs to a subject central to Counter-Reformation devotional painting: the mystical union of the Franciscan founder with the divine, most memorably rendered in Caravaggio's early version for Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte around 1595. Rubens, who was in Rome in the years following Caravaggio's early triumph, would have known the Stigmatization of Saint Francis through both direct encounter and engraving, and his own treatments of Franciscan subjects demonstrate the deep influence of the Caravaggesque tradition on his formation. The subject's popularity across the seventeenth century reflected the Franciscan order's importance as a patron of Baroque altarpieces throughout Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Netherlands. The attribution of a 1700 picture to Rubens reflects the characteristic pattern of posthumous expansion of the Rubens catalogue: as his reputation grew through the eighteenth century, Flemish dealers and collectors attributed an ever-broader group of Rubenesque works to his hand. The picture's actual authorship, whether by a late seventeenth-century Flemish painter or an early eighteenth-century artist in the Flemish Baroque tradition, remains unresolved.

The subject typically presents Francis collapsed in rapturous abandon, supported by an angel or alone in the wilderness, with his stigmata wounds visible. The Rubenesque tradition renders this in warm, fleshy tones with dramatic upward light suggesting the heavenly source of the vision.