Stigmata of Saint Francis

The Stigmata of Saint Francis by the Master of the Lindau Lamentation, painted around 1500 and now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, depicts the miracle of La Verna in which Francis of Assisi received the wounds of Christ's Passion on his hands, feet, and side during a mystical vision of the seraphic crucified Christ. The anonymous master, named for a Lamentation panel in Lindau, was active in the German-speaking region and produced work of considerable quality in the tradition of late German Gothic and early Renaissance painting. The Franciscan subject of the stigmatization was among the most frequently commissioned devotional images in the late fifteenth century, reflecting the enormous institutional and devotional power of the Franciscan order in European religious life. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum's panel preserves this work in the important context of one of Germany's finest collections of medieval and early modern painting.

The master renders the stigmatization on the rocky mountain of La Verna with the measured devotional clarity characteristic of his identified works, Francis in the kneeling position of mystical reception while the seraphic figure of the crucified Christ radiates the wounds from above. The German late Gothic tradition informs the precise linear handling of drapery and the expressive intensity of the saint's upturned face.