Saint Francis in the Desert, painted by the Venetian master Giovanni Bellini in the years around 1480. It illustrates the moment in Christian legend when God honored Saint Francis of Assisi with the stigmata, a moment that Bellini pictures in terms of immaterial light touching down on human flesh. Bellini’s Saint Francis is also one of the first Italian pictures to take full advantage of how such immaterial light could be captured in the very material medium of oil paint.
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Saint Francis opens his arms and presents his hands to receive God’s favor, which sweeps over him as a flood of light, casting strong shadows from Francis and all the objects closest to him.
The light breaking through the clouds at the top left of the painting stands in for the winged seraph that had stood for divine power in earlier paintings of the subject. A new scientific study of the painting shows that this is where Bellini applied his oil paints most thickly, helping to equate his act of painting with a moment of illumination.
Bellini imagines the divine light that he renders as so powerful that it bends the branches on a tree that gets between it and Saint Francis. And his stunning use of oil paints lets him show light getting caught in the leaves of the tree.
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Light is what gives substance to the objects in Bellini’s painting. Would this castle, or the clouds above it, have nearly the same presence without the raking light that plays across them?
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Possibly the most virtuoso rendering of light in the entire painting comes, appropriately, on the scrap of paper that bears Bellini’s signature. Its complex folds and scruffy right edge depend almost entirely on light to make themselves felt.
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The rivulet of water running from the rocks in front of Saint Francis is only visible in life because of how it reflects light, and is only visible in the painting because Bellini uses the special transparency of oil paint to render it.
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We can read the complex folds of these grape leaves only because of how Bellini renders the light that strikes them, and the shadows cast by that light.
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Even in this tiniest of all details in the painting, Bellini uses light to define the objects he’s showing: we understand that the leftmost daisy is being shown in profile only because of how Bellini distinguishes between the light on the front of its petals and the shadow on their backs.
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In Bellini’s painting, God lives in all of nature, by lighting it up—and all of nature seems to participate in God’s illumination of Saint Francis. Bellini uses his oil paints to build a sense of light playing across the donkey’s velvety coat.
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The wildflowers littered across the meadows in Bellini’s scene are nothing more than tiny points of light, rendered by tiny flecks of oil paint.
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