18th C. Mexican Colonial Oil Portrait, St. Francis of Paola

Mexico, Spanish Colonial tradition. An oil-on-canvas devotional portrait of St. Francis of Paola, the Calabrian hermit who founded the Order of Minims. The saint appears aged and gaunt, bearded, and cowled in the black hooded habit of his order. He grasps a hermit's staff and cradles a crucifix with its curling INRI titulus, with a penitential prayer cord looped over one finger. In the upper corner is the word CHARITAS within a flaming sun, the Minim emblem attributed to the saint. A skull rests below as memento mori. The picture descends from Iberian prototypes by Murillo and Ribera that circulated as prints and were copied in colonial workshops. St. Francis of Paola (1416 to 1507) founded the Order of Minims, whose name derives from the Latin for "the least," announcing a program of radical humility. He lived to ninety-one and is conventionally shown old and worn, having declined every dignity the Church offered him. The CHARITAS sunburst is his defining attribute and belongs to no other saint; it functions as a visual signature wherever his image travels. He is most easily confused with Francis of Assisi, but Assisi wears brown, bears the stigmata, and carries no sunburst emblem. Here the black habit and the flaming CHARITAS settle the identification decisively. Widely venerated across New Spain and the Andes, his image traveled the Spanish-speaking world through engravings that local painters adapted freely, the flat, linear handling of the face here pointing to a Mexican provincial hand. Please note that pigments on this painting contain levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic. Item # 203651

Estimate:$400

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