Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata in Turin

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata in Turin

Francis kneels on a shelf of rock, opens his hands and looks towards a tiny crucified Christ within the wings of a seraph. Beside him, Brother Leo bends forward with his head withdrawn. A distant town stretches between the cliffs. In the Galleria Sabauda's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, a supernatural encounter occupies the same clear light as stone, cloth, water and buildings. Turin's museum presents the picture as Jan van Eyck's work and singles out its minute, crystalline painting.^[1]

The panel belongs to an unusually demanding comparison. The Philadelphia Saint Francis repeats almost the same arrangement on a much smaller support. Their relationship raises questions about the invention of the composition, the painter responsible for each version, and the religious purposes served by repetition. Those questions become clearer when Turin's own appearance and history are considered first, before treating either surviving object as a straightforward copy of the other.^[2][3]

Francis, Leo and the apparition

The stigmata are the bodily wounds corresponding to Christ's crucifixion. The image represents the Franciscan account of the saint's vision during his retreat at La Verna. Philadelphia's museum situates the related scene during a forty-day fast. Here the essential encounter is conveyed through the saint's posture: his face lifts, his arms separate from his body, and his hands become especially conspicuous against the landscape. The composition asks the viewer to connect the apparition with Francis's own exposed flesh.^[4]

Francis's habit forms a broad, heavy shape. Its folds have a physical weight that contrasts with the small airborne figure above him. The saint is neither dissolving into light nor removed from the rocky ground. His bent legs and visible feet keep the experience anchored in a human body. This matters to the subject: a vision of the crucified Christ is being translated into wounds borne by a living person. The extraordinary event remains legible through the relation between two bodies of radically different painted sizes.

The seraphic apparition is easy to overlook in a small reproduction. Look above and to the right of Francis, where the reddish wings enclose the crucified figure. Its modest area does not make it a marginal detail. Francis's gaze gives it authority, and the open interval between them makes their encounter the composition's central action. The rocks frame this diagonal exchange without creating a separate celestial compartment. The miracle enters the landscape rather than replacing it.

Leo provides a strikingly different human presence. His folded posture closes inwards where Francis's opens outwards. His face is less available to us, and the bulk of his habit occupies a substantial part of the foreground. The contrast can suggest withdrawal, sleep or an experience separate from the saint's; it should not become an invented account of Leo's thoughts. The visible distinction is sufficient: two friars occupy the same place, but only one directs his gaze towards the apparition.

That difference gives the viewer a position distinct from either figure. We can inspect Francis, Leo and Christ together, while Leo does not visibly share Francis's line of sight. The painting therefore offers more than an illustration of a miraculous wound. It organises different degrees of attention. The saint attends to the vision, his companion turns inwards, and the beholder is invited to move between the two. The scene's restraint leaves room for prolonged looking without needing an added crowd of witnesses.

The rocky foreground and the inhabited distance

The foreground rocks are almost another set of actors. Their sharp ledges, sloping planes and dark recesses determine where the friars can kneel or sit. They also divide the image into pockets of exposure and shelter. Stone surrounds the figures without sealing them off: a narrow opening carries the eye towards a landscape whose scale suddenly exceeds the human encounter. This transition from close texture to distant settlement is one of the picture's most effective changes of pace.

La Verna provides the subject's geographical setting, but an evocation of that mountain need not be a measured view of it. The Italian national catalogue draws attention to a resemblance between the painted rocks and those associated with La Verna. That observation does not establish that Jan visited the site, copied a particular cliff or recorded its geology in person. The painting can combine a recognisable sacred wilderness with a constructed landscape. Its persuasive detail should be distinguished from documentary topography.^[2]

Beyond the immediate crags, the town introduces another kind of order. The irregular foreground is set against built forms, clustered roofs and the fine articulation of a populated distance. The related Philadelphia museum text calls its city Netherlandish. Turin's image likewise invites comparison with a northern urban world, although a visual resemblance cannot supply a securely identified town. Calling it Bruges, Jerusalem or a particular Italian city would require evidence beyond the buildings' convincing appearance.^[4]

The distance also changes the emotional scale. Francis's encounter is intensely personal, but the surrounding world continues beyond it. The town is neither engulfed by a supernatural glow nor pushed into an abstract gold background. It belongs to the same illuminated space as the friars. A viewer can move from the saint's face to a building almost lost on the horizon and still feel that both exist within one coherent world. This is a devotional image whose power depends partly on how fully it sustains ordinary visibility.

Smallness encourages a particular rhythm of looking. At first the eye registers two brown-robed figures in a rocky setting. Closer inspection separates different surfaces and reveals how much space the opening contains. Returning to the whole then restores the balance between narrative and landscape. Enlarged photographs help locate individual features, but they change that original encounter: details which expand across a screen occupy minute areas of the actual panel. The relationship between tiny marks and an extensive imagined world is part of the achievement.

The Turin object: scale, support and date

The Italian national catalogue records an oil painting on wood measuring 29.2 by 33.4 centimetres, inventory number 7. It gives a broad date around 1430 and before 1441, with an early-1430s proposal in its commentary. These are catalogue judgements, rather than an inscribed production date. The 2026 attribution study instead captions Turin's painting 1435–1440. The disagreement is useful: it prevents a provisional chronology from hardening into an exact year.^[2][5]

Turin's panel is substantially larger than Philadelphia's, which its museum currently dates 1430–1432. The difference allows more physical room for the same closely related arrangement; it does not by itself establish which came first. A larger version could develop an invention, preserve an existing model or answer a different requirement from a patron. A smaller one could equally involve a fresh execution rather than mechanical reduction. Relative size becomes evidence only when combined with the objects' materials and working processes.^[4]

The two museums' displayed chronologies also resist a simple chronological ladder. If current dates do not agree, it is misleading to arrange the pair into a securely dated sequence merely because one is larger. The Turin and Philadelphia pictures should remain distinguishable whenever dates, support or condition are discussed. Their common design is a starting point for comparison; it does not make information documented for one automatically applicable to the other.

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A small sacred panel could sustain private contemplation, but Turin's original room, owner and manner of display are not securely established. The most suggestive written evidence concerns a family arrangement made decades after Jan's death. That document raises the possibility of framed or shuttered devotional objects. It does not permit reconstruction of the Turin panel's missing furniture or prove that this particular painting accompanied a traveller. The proposed function must follow the evidence rather than the intimacy of the image alone.

What Adornes's testament actually establishes

The much-cited testament of Anselm Adornes is dated 10 February 1470. In Alphonse De Poorter's 1931 edition, clause 22 envisages a small painting containing Saint Francis by Jan van Eyck for each of Adornes's daughters Margriete and Lowijse, who had entered religious life. It also directs that likenesses of Adornes and his wife should be painted on the enclosing shutters, so that the recipients and other devout people would remember them. The instruction makes prayer for the family an explicit purpose of the intended arrangement.^[6]

This is unusually valuable evidence because it names an artist and subject within a particular devotional transaction. Yet it does not describe the rocks, the seraph, Leo, dimensions or the material of the two surviving works. The match between two documented Saint Francis pictures and two surviving versions is attractive; it is not an identification secured by a detailed inventory description. Even the wording about the shutters requires care. It orders donor portraits to be made on them, rather than unambiguously proving when every part of the physical enclosure was constructed.^[6]

The distinction between intention and completed transfer is equally important. Noël Geirnaert's archival reassessment explains that Adornes made the will shortly before leaving for the Holy Land, returned in April 1471 and lived until 1483. Geirnaert concludes that the paintings were not given to the daughters named in 1470; he proposes Pieter and Katheline, two other children in Franciscan communities, as the probable eventual beneficiaries. He also considers the intended donor portraits unlikely to have been executed.^[7]

The surviving text has a history of its own. Geirnaert identifies De Poorter's source as a notarial copy from the second quarter of the sixteenth century, probably the 1530s, rather than Adornes's original autograph. He reports the copy itself missing by 2001, with photographs preserving several pages; these support the edition's general reliability but reveal that later amendments were not distinguished adequately. His criticism concerns transmission and interpretation, not a blanket rejection of the testament as fabricated.^[7]

For Turin, the practical conclusion is precise. The document supports the existence of two Saint Francis images associated with Jan's name in the Adornes family. It supplies evidence of memorial devotion and proposed donor imagery. It does not provide an unbroken ownership trail for the Sabauda panel. A possible Adornes association should therefore remain possible, and the planned bequest should not be recounted as a completed 1470 gift. The gaps matter because they separate a compelling historical context from the actual provenance of this object.

From Casale Monferrato to the Galleria Sabauda

Turin's secure museum history begins with acquisition in 1866. The Galleria Sabauda's visitor guide records the purchase at Casale Monferrato; the national catalogue identifies the seller as Luigi Fascio. That nineteenth-century transaction is a firmer anchor than the proposed fifteenth-century family connection. It should not be joined to the Adornes story by an imagined chain of descent. Nor does the panel's present place among northern pictures mean that it entered with every other celebrated group in the gallery.^[1][2]

An early French-language response helps recover how the painting was viewed after that acquisition. In his nineteenth-century commentary accompanying the translation of Karel van Mander's Le livre des peintres, Henri Hymans links Turin's picture with the Saint Francis then owned by Lord Heytesbury. He remarks on Turin's damaged condition while praising the treatment of hands, feet and draperies. The distant town makes him think of the Rolin Madonna.^[8]

Hymans's observations are evidence of reception, not an early eyewitness record of Jan's workshop. His text belongs to an editor's nineteenth-century commentary, although it appears in a translation of a much earlier author. Keeping those layers separate prevents the modern identification of the two pictures from acquiring a false sixteenth-century authority. His simultaneous recognition of beauty and damage is also instructive: appreciation of the painting and concern about its surface have long existed together.

The pair later became the centre of Recognizing Van Eyck, organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Galleria Sabauda with London's National Gallery. Its itinerary ran from Turin in late 1997 to London and Philadelphia in 1998. That collaboration gave the two objects a shared setting for renewed examination. The exhibition's historical dating should not simply replace the dates now used in museum records, but its joint presentation remains an important stage in the modern comparison.^[9]

Conservation and the evidence beneath the surface

The visible paint includes the consequences of conservation as well as fifteenth-century work. The 2026 study, drawing on Carla Enrica Spantigati's published account, describes interventions around 1952, in 1970 and in 1982. Retouching affected areas including Francis's hair, the central landscape and Leo's habit. The later campaigns differed in their treatment of earlier additions: cleaning in 1970 retained them, whereas the 1982 intervention selectively removed non-original overpaint identified with ultraviolet examination and introduced distinguishable retouching.^[5]

Those locations are worth remembering when looking. Hair, folds and vegetation are precisely the passages in which a viewer might try to recognise an artist's characteristic touch. Their history does not make the whole picture unreadable, but it changes what a particular stroke can establish. A judgement based on a photographed surface must account for losses, additions and varnish rather than assuming that every visible mark is original. Equally, describing treatment is not a licence to guess which tiny strokes have survived unchanged.

Belgium's KIK-IRPA has made comparison more dependable by photographing the two Saint Francis paintings with identical equipment and protocols. Its French-language account explains that normal-light images can be compared alongside infrared reflectography and radiographs. Some corresponding details agree to a remarkable degree despite the difference in size. The institute nevertheless stresses that interpreting the similarities and differences remains debated. Standardisation gives researchers better evidence; it does not replace the argument about what that evidence means.^[3]

Underdrawing changes reported for Turin have often supported the idea of an inventive working process. A change beneath the final paint differs from a contour followed without alteration. Yet invention and execution need not belong to the same individual in a workshop. Someone could supply or revise a design which another painter carried into colour. The useful question is therefore not simply whether changes exist, but how they relate to the painted layers and to the corresponding design in Philadelphia.^[5]

Attribution, repetition and the 2026 study

The Italian national catalogue presents Turin as the first version and Philadelphia as an autograph repetition, both produced in Jan's workshop. Other scholars have favoured different relationships, including workshop production after an earlier invention. The 2026 study by Till-Holger Borchert, Alessandra Conti, Batu Arda Düzgün and Carina Popovici starts from this continuing disagreement. Its existence should not be described as a new discovery that a previously uncontested painting might involve a workshop.^[2][5]

The study tests how restoration and the choice of training examples affect an image classifier. For Turin, excluding selected restored areas changes one model's positive score from 17.9 to 73.8 percent; a more restricted training set produces a smaller change, from 47.7 to 57.6 percent. These are model outputs under specified conditions. They are neither measurements of how much Jan painted nor historical probabilities that resolve authorship. Digitally masking areas also does not physically recover lost paint.^[5]

The contrast between those results is more instructive than a single headline percentage. A classifier responds to the examples and image areas it receives. Changing either changes the question being tested. An attribution argument still needs to explain the relationship between design, execution, conservation and documentary history. A coloured heatmap showing which regions influenced a result should likewise be read as a view of the model's behaviour, rather than a map assigning original brushstrokes to Jan.

For the viewer, uncertainty need not flatten the painting's interest. The composition's remarkable economy survives every proposed distribution of labour: two friars, one apparition and a landscape that opens between great masses of rock. Turin's scale, painted surface and documented collecting history make it an individual object. Comparing Philadelphia can sharpen attention to it, but should not replace that attention. Begin with the saint's lifted face, follow his gaze towards Christ, and then return through Leo's closed posture to the distant inhabited world.

Related reading

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata: the Philadelphia painting

The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin

Ghent Altarpiece

References

1. Musei Reali Torino, Percorsi consigliati: Galleria Sabauda, printed p. 14, acquisition and museum presentation. View Source
2. Italian Ministry of Culture, national catalogue record 0100350981, “Stimmate di San Francesco,” object data and institutional interpretation; publicly indexed record consulted. View Source
3. KIK-IRPA, “À chaque détail, un pur émerveillement ! Van Eyck en ligne et à BOZAR,” 19 February 2021, standardised photography and comparative interpretation. View Source
4. Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata,” current public object introduction, dating and interpretation of the related smaller work. View Source
5. Till-Holger Borchert, Alessandra Conti, Batu Arda Düzgün and Carina Popovici, “Integrating Art Historical Knowledge into AI-Based Authorship Detection in Jan van Eyck's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata,” Kunstgeschichte, 2026; conservation summary on pp. 10–11 and comparative results on pp. 12–13. View Source
6. Alphonse De Poorter, “Testament van Anselmus Adornes (1470),” Biekorf 37, 1931, pp. 225–239, especially clause 22 on p. 234. View Source
7. Noël Geirnaert, “Putten uit honderd jaar Biekorf,” section II, “Het testament van Anselm Adornes (1470),” Biekorf 101, 2001, pp. 102–105, reassessment of the text and intended beneficiaries. View Source
8. Henri Hymans, editorial commentary in Karel van Mander, Le livre des peintres, vol. 1, p. 47, nineteenth-century reception of the Turin and Heytesbury paintings. View Source
9. Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Recognizing Van Eyck,” exhibition history, collaborating institutions and 1997–1998 itinerary. View Source