The scene alludes to a passage from Bonaventura da Bagnoregio's Legenda maior in which it is told of how Francis, who returned to Monte della Verna in 1224, and opened the Gospel three times at random, always to the story of the Passion, meditates on his ultimate destiny of total conformity to the martyrdom of Christ which will later lead to the stigmata, which are actually still missing here.

The profound interiorization of the revelation, emphasized by the presence of the crucifix which seems to stop the pages of the Gospel, reveals in the Cremonese painting some autobiographical implications in relation to the personal events of the painter. Caravaggio, in fact, following the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni (May 28, 1606) was subject to an obsessive desire for expiation.

The recent hypotheses regarding the commissioning of the painting by Monsignor Benedetto Ala, from Cremona, governor of Rome from 1604 to 1610, and on several occasions protector of Caravaggio, are being confirmed, by means of whom he perhaps hoped to obtain the revocation of the ban. capital.

To support this thesis is the face of the saint in which the painter's features can be easily recognized. The hypothesis that, through this painting, he had wanted to entrust his patron with a sort of confession of his state of mind and of his resignation for a future that foreshadowed uncertain and with little hope, therefore becomes more and more suggestive.