St. Francis in ecstasy

Among the most beloved subjects in Baroque devotional painting, Francis of Assisi in ecstasy offered artists an opportunity to render the boundary between the physical and the divine. Strozzi's 1618 version, now at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, was painted while he was still practicing as a friar — making the subject literally autobiographical in a spiritual sense. Francis receives the stigmata or simply rises in contemplative rapture; either way, Strozzi invests the moment with the muscular, almost pained physicality he had absorbed from Rubens's 1607–08 Genoese stay. The painting predates Strozzi's conflict with his order, giving it a devotional sincerity untouched by later bitterness. Ecstasy subjects were in high demand from Genoese church and private patrons in the 1610s–20s, and Strozzi painted Francis multiple times, each version testing his ability to make transcendence legible in flesh and cloth.

Canvas; the palette is characteristically warm, with Francis's brown habit anchored against a softly lit sky. Strong directional light, possibly from upper left, illuminates the upturned face and models the folds of the rough wool with sculptural authority. The brushwork in the habit is broader and more gestural than in the face.