The Vision of Saint Francis of Assisi

Ludovico Carracci was one of the earliest painters to explore the emotional side of religious revelation. Here he illustrated, for the first time in art, an episode in which one of Saint Francis’s followers witnessed an apparition of the Virgin giving the Christ Child to the saint to hold. Carracci distinguished the heavenly light around the Virgin from the nocturnal moonlit landscape (on the left at the painting), at the same time he emphasized the intensely spiritual nature of Francis’s experience.