St Francis in Ecstasy

Saint Francis in Ecstasy at the Bowes Museum (c. 1620–25) depicts the Franciscan founder in one of the mystical encounters that distinguished his spiritual life — the stigmatization, the conversations with angels, the experience of divine love as physical sensation. Reni's treatment of Franciscan ecstasy follows a tradition established by El Greco and Caravaggio but transforms it into something characteristically Bolognese: the saint's upturned face and parted lips suggest spiritual rapture without the convulsive intensity of Spanish or Caravaggesque treatments. The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, is one of Britain's most unusual art museums — a grand French-style château built in the 1870s by John Bowes and his wife Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier to house their extraordinary European art collection. The museum's Italian Baroque holdings, acquired in Paris during the Second Empire, include several important works that document the range of seventeenth-century Italian religious painting available to determined collectors in mid-Victorian France.

The ecstatic saint is bathed in celestial light, rendered with Reni's characteristic smooth luminosity. The refined emotional expression captures the spiritual transport.