A Miracle of Saint Francis of Paola
Sebastiano Ricci·1733
Historical Context
Ricci's painting of a miracle of Saint Francis of Paola from 1733 reflects his late career's sustained productivity in devotional and religious subjects for Italian and European patrons. Francis of Paola, the Calabrian hermit who founded the Minim order and became celebrated for miraculous healings and supernatural phenomena, was a popular Counter-Reformation saint whose miracles provided artists with dramatic narrative subjects. Ricci was nearly eighty when he painted this work — remarkable evidence of sustained creative energy — his late style maintaining the warm Venetian coloring and confident figure arrangement that had characterized his approach throughout a long and productive career.
Technical Analysis
The oil on canvas features Ricci's luminous palette and sweeping compositional movement, with dramatic diagonal arrangements and airy spatial effects that bridge the grandeur of Baroque religious painting with Rococo elegance.
Provenance
Count Grigory Stroganov [1829-1910], Rome.[1] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome, 1927); purchased 1931 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] According to National Gallery of Art, _Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture_, Washington, D.C., 1941: 169. This painting and its pendant (NGA 1939.1.72) do not appear in catalogues of Stroganov sales or in those of the collection, which include only selected works. According to Antonio Muñoz, _La collezione Stroganoff_, Rome, 1910, Stroganov amassed his collection c. 1880-1890 and bought many things from the sale of Cardinal Immenraet. It has not been possible to locate a catalogue of the Immenraet collection. [2] The dates are given on the back of a photograph sent to the Frick Art Reference Library by Alessandro Contini Bonacossi at the NGA on 1 July 1969. The painting and its pendant are documented in the Kress collection in 1932 by Alfred M. Frankfurter, "Eighteenth Century Venice in a New York Collection", _The Fine Arts_ 19 (December 1932): 30; see also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/64.
_-_The_Continence_of_Scipio_-_RCIN_404981_-_Royal_Collection.jpg&width=600)
