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Ala Ponzone Civic Museum verified

Cremona, Lombardy, Italy open Visit museumarrow_right_alt

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Arcimboldo - The gardener
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Michelangelo Merisi, detto Caravaggio - Saint Francis in meditation
fullscreen
Platina wardrobe
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Giuseppe Diotti - Count Ugolino in the tower
fullscreen
Giovanni Battista Trotti - Beheading of St. John the Baptist
fullscreen
 Luigi Miradori  - Birth of the Virgin
fullscreen
Galeazzo Ghidoni  - Preaching of St. John the Baptist in the desert
fullscreen
Giovanni Carnovali, detto il Piccio - Portrait of Giovanni Beltrami
fullscreen
 Luigi Miradori  - Portrait of Sigismondo Ponzoni
fullscreen
Vincenzo Campi - Sammartino
fullscreen
Felice Giuseppe Vertua - View of Cremona from the Po
Arcimboldo - The gardener
Michelangelo Merisi, detto Caravaggio - Saint Francis in meditation
Platina wardrobe
Giuseppe Diotti - Count Ugolino in the tower
Giovanni Battista Trotti - Beheading of St. John the Baptist
 Luigi Miradori  - Birth of the Virgin
Galeazzo Ghidoni  - Preaching of St. John the Baptist in the desert
Giovanni Carnovali, detto il Piccio - Portrait of Giovanni Beltrami
 Luigi Miradori  - Portrait of Sigismondo Ponzoni
Vincenzo Campi - Sammartino
Felice Giuseppe Vertua - View of Cremona from the Po

Other works on display

Description

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.


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