Not even bright sunlight can dispel the mystery of Saint Francis in the Desert at the Frick. How could it? The painting’s glorious sunlight is its greatest miracle.
It infuses the landscape, as painting before Giovanni Bellini never could. If Francis here is receiving the stigmata, or wounds of the crucified Christ, as the story goes, light may also be the bearer of that miracle. Not just scholars will be arguing over it for a long time to come. As it is, no one can agree on what Bellini depicts or even the time of day. The saint, in legend, wrote songs while renouncing worldly goods for a life in nature, 
and his open mouth may express ecstasy, wonder, or the moment before singing. No other work at the Frick Madison has had its own room.
For now, though, he has a still more mysterious companion in paint, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. A visitor to a villa in Venice in 1525 described it as Three Philosophers, but was he right, and which three? Whatever are they doing together, out of doors and far from home? What did Giorgione, its likely painter, owe to philosophy, and what was his contribution to the painting of sunlight, shadow, and landscape in oil? Did he in fact paint this one? Scholars have been looking for answers ever since, but you will just have to find your own in “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini,” through February 4.
Giovanni Bellini completed his Saint Francis before 1480, with clean lines and clear skies that mark him as a painter of the early Renaissance. Giorgione painted Three Philosophers thirty years later, in 1509. That, the richness of his colors, and the fullness of his forms place him in the High Renaissance in Venice. Titian, its greatest figure, entered his workshop and completed at least one of his surviving works, a Sleeping Venus. Bellini was part of the city’s leading family of painters, along with his father, Jacopo Bellini, his brother Gentile, and his cousin, Andrea Mantegna. Giorgione was a stranger to Venice when he arrived from a small town to make his career.
Still, they seem made for each other. They may belong on paper to different eras, but they share that special moment when oil paint was transforming art, by allowing that richness and fullness. Jacopo himself may have introduced it to Venice, decades after Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin made it the medium of the North Renaissance. One can see it in Saint Francis in a tree, where the colors run into one another and the oil still seems wet. One can see it that much more in the warmth of Three Philosophers. One can see it in everything from the loose brushwork of a philosopher’s short beard, to leaves emerging from darkness seemingly as one looks, to the translucency of a church or villa in the middle distance, to the blue of distant mountains.
The two paintings seem made for each other as well. Both depict figures in a landscape—not so much to contemplate nature as to take part in it. Nature, in turn, responds to them. That tree from Bellini leans toward Francis from across the canvas, as part of the miracle. In a minority view of the painting, after a folk tale, bright morning sunlight has appeared before dawn, calling a shepherd in the distance to his work. Two trees intertwine to frame perfectly the central of the three philosophers.
In both, the actors appear at the right. Tall rocks form natural stairs and a natural home. Francis emerges from one cave mouth, while the leftmost of the philosophers, seated, faces another. At least tradition calls it a cave, but if it is only a rock face textured by vegetation, its darkness is interesting enough for him and for me. He holds a mathematician’s or artist’s tools, a compass and a triangle, to take its measure. Francis faces only an ass, as stoic as any philosopher, and the light, but that, too, is enough.
In both paintings, the figures are decidedly apart from civilization and ever so close. Francis has an entire city, behind a fence and across a stream, with no need for other signs of life. Giorgione’s translucent church or villa seems to arise from its place in the landscape like a vision, with another an indefinite distance behind it. Both buildings give way to far-off hills, covered with greenery and dissolving into blue. Some historians see the color, which to me looks natural, as unexplained, perhaps a further miracle. Once again, nature and culture respond to each other.
And then there is the shared mystery of what is really going on. Francis has spread his arms, out of obedience or in joy. If he is indeed receiving the stigmata, though, where are the rays that in other depictions pierce his open palms? I devote a longer review (and one of this Web site’s first) to the painting’s mysteries, and you can read more for the whole story. I argue that sunlight itself is the source of the miracle—and, by extension, so is painting in oil. That and, for now, natural light from a Marcel Breuer window at the Frick Madison—and I turn next time to the three philosophers.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.