St Francis

religious

In some respects this work is associated with the point in Morazzone's career when he was working on the frescoes in the seventh chapel at the Sacro Monte, Varese. The painting may be viewed as a symbol of the tireless search for subtleties and depth of feeling that marked the Counter-Reformation spirit of seventeenth-century Lombard painting. Having abandoned the profane elegance of the preceding period, it strains for a programmed mortification of the senses.

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About the Artist

Morazzone

1573 – 1626

Italian painter, originally Pier Francesco Mazzuchelli. Together with Giovanni Battista Crespi and Giulio Cesare Procaccini, he was the leading Milanese painter of the early 17th century. Like Crespi, he was in Rome in the 1590s, where frescoes by him survive in S. Silvestro in Capite. Even more than Crespi and Procaccini, however, he based his art on Gaudenzio Ferrari, and his principal works are also for chapels on the Sacro Monti at Varallo, Varese and Novara. At the time of his death he was painting frescoes in Piacenza Cathedral, completed by Guercino. There are many works by him in museums and churches in Milan.

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