page_title: Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (van Eyck)
section_title: Landscape
hierarchical_section_title: Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (van Eyck) / The panels / Landscape
caption_attribution_description: Detail, Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, Philadelphia Museum of Art
context_page_description: Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata is the name given to two unsigned paintings completed around 1428–1432 that art historians usually attribute to the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck. The panels are nearly identical, apart from a considerable difference in size. Both are small paintings: the larger measures 29.3 cm x 33.4 cm and is in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin, Italy; the smaller panel is 12.7 cm x 14.6 cm and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The earliest documentary evidence is in the 1470 inventory of Anselm Adornes of Bruges's will; he may have owned both panels.
  The paintings show a famous incident from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is shown kneeling by a rock as he receives the stigmata of the crucified Christ on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet. Behind him are rock formations, shown in great detail, and a panoramic landscape. This treatment of Francis is the first such to appear in northern Renaissance art.
  The arguments attributing the works to van Eyck are circumstantial and based mainly on the style and quality of the panels.
context_section_description: Nature is a key aspect in van Eyck's works. According to Rishel, elements of his landscapes may appear "magically beautiful but [are] in fact quite oblivious to the sacred action in the foreground". Katherine Luber believes that open vistas and lowered horizons are a hallmark. The Francis paintings seem to be early experiments with landscape; the painter places rocks in the mid-ground, solving the problem of how to transition from foreground to background; a similar resolution is found in the lower-right wing of the Ghent Altarpiece.
  The browns of the rocks and trees echo those of the robes of the saints. The broad sweep of the mountains and city isolates the figures against the grandeur of nature and bustling human life. Behind the figures a panoramic mountain landscape soars to the sky; the mid-ground contains a variety of rocks and spikes, including strata of fossiliferous layers. As with the New York Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych, the mountains are capped with snow, which van Eyck may have seen during his visits to Italy and Spain, where he crossed the Alps and Pyrenees.
  The paintings contain some highly detailed rock formations. Despite the early to mid-15th century date, the conservator Kenneth Bé observes that, to modern geologists "the details, colors, textures, and morphologies in Van Eyck's rendering of rocks yield a plethora of scientifically accurate information". He identifies four distinct rock types. Those in the right foreground are heavily weathered limestone boulders. There are identifiable shell fossils, painted in a dark reddish brown suggesting iron or dark-coloured mineral impurities. Behind them is a stratified sedimentary sequence. The mid-ground contains igneous rock, the far distance a pair of jagged peaks.
  Specialists from both art history and geology have remarked on the level of observed and precise detail found in the background. The mid-ground contains a boulder with a crescent-shaped form that could only have arisen from the rock face "intersecting the fossils to reveal cross sections of the shells in side profile", according to Bé. Another boulder has closed loops. The fossilised shells are in a pattern that suggest that some of the boulders have been upturned from their original orientation. The fossils are a type of mollusk similar either to present-day bivalvia or brachiopods.
  The landscape shows a fictive Flemish city. As in the diptych in New York, some buildings and landmarks can be identified with Jerusalem. It closely resembles the background of the Rolin panel, which has undergone much deeper attention from scholars, with several identifications made with structures in Jerusalem, including the Mosque of Omar, known to van Eyck through second-hand textual and visual descriptions. People and animals populate the city walls, but some are only visible under magnification in the Philadelphia painting. The lake by the city shows a boat whose shadow is reflected in the water. Reflective water surfaces were another typical Eyckian innovation, one he seems to have mastered early, evidenced by the water scenes in the "Turin-Milan Hours", and which requires a considerable degree of artistry. Plants consist of tiny foreground flowers, larger mid-ground grasses and background bushes and trees. The small carpet of white flowers in the foreground is reminiscent of those in the Ghent Altarpiece's central panel; behind Francis are dwarf palms.
caption: Detail showing layers of detached limestone boulders (Philadelphia)
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