Jacobello del Fiore was one of the principal Venetian painters of the International Gothic period, and this gold-ground tempera panel represents perhaps the earliest work confidently attributed to him. It stands as a continuation of Byzantine-influenced Venetian artistry, characterized by gold ground, flat modeling, and hieratic frontality. The work’s depiction of the miracle of the stigmatization reflects Giotto’s iconography in Scene XIX of the Legend of St. Francis, frescoed in the upper church of San Francesco in Assisi, with the image of Christ as a Seraph appearing to the saint on Mount La Verna on 17 September 1224 against the backdrop of a very rocky landscape. Yet the scene is hardly barren, as the artist includes naturalistic details such as bushes and clumps of grass in the foreground, and rich, luxuriant vegetation growing in the gulley between two rocky crags. St. Francis’s spiritual progress is itself limned with delicate filaments of gold on the plants, on the leafy boughs of the trees in the center of the scene and even on the sloping roof of the Sanctuary of La Verna, the façade of which is surmounted by a similarly gilded cross. The miracle was particularly charged for Franciscan patronage but extended to a general lay audience, who understood the stigmata as the most complete identification of a human being with Christ’s passion.
