Saint Francis in Prayer, monogrammed in the lower right corner: “L. C.” and inscribed on the stretcher at lower right: “Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli Fece”, oil on canvas, 153 x 117.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
European private collection

We are grateful to Professor Miles Chapell for confirming the attribution on the basis of a digital photograph.

We are also grateful to Dr. Roberto Contini for independently confirming the attribution on the basis of a digital photograph.

The present canvas is a hitherto unpublished version of a composition that Cigoli revisited several times. It can be closely compared to other versions at the Ponce Art Museum in Puerto Rico, in the Scavizzi Collection in Florence, and in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

The group of paintings, all of which are nearly identical in composition, have been dated to the last ten years of the painter’s career around 1596 to 1598. This image created by the artist innovates the iconography of the saint kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, a skull and a bible, after receiving the stigmata on Mount Verna. It became a model for representations of the saint and inspired numerous works by Cigoli´s pupil Cristofano Allori (see M. Chapell, Cristofano Allori’s Paintings Depicting St. Francis, in: The Burlington Magazine, 1971, 821, p. 444).

Cigoli revitalized the devotional image of Saint Francis, representing the poverty of the Saint by means of a naturalistic treatment of the rough-textured and patched habit. These elements are rendered in the present painting with the same attention to detail seen in the other autograph versions. The intense and expressive face is similar to the version in Rome. The landscape in the foreground resembles those in other versions by Cigoli, such as in the one in Florence, where the intervention of the Flemish artist Adriano Cili, who was documented as being in Cigoli’s workshop, has been proposed (see S. Padovani, in Ludovico Cigoli tra manierismo e barocco, exhibition catalogue, Fiesole 1992, pp. 98–99, no. 16).

Ludovico Cardi was born at Villa Castelvecchio di Cigoli in Tuscany, and his hometown became a synonym. He trained in Florence with Alessandro Allori and was also influenced by the most prominent Counter-Reformation painters, such as Santi di Tito.