Capturing Francis

How do you portray sanctity? This question followed me around the St Francis of Assisi exhibition at the National Gallery, where, the other day, I wandered through rooms dedicated to depictions of this extraordinary man and his enduring, wide-ranging legacy. How do you portray the sheer sanctity of a man whose union with Christ was absolute? And how do you capture the essence of a man who has himself already captured the hearts and imaginations of a diverse range of people?

Francis' radical poverty and asceticism were depicted easily enough in many of the paintings: a skinny frame, clad in a patched, worn tunic, his feet bare, his face a study in lean intensity. The threadbare remains of one habit were on display, too, a precious, poignant relic in an incongruously ornate gold frame. But there was more to Francis than sackcloth, and elsewhere, exultantly outstretched arms and a radiant, joyous face showed him rejoicing in creation. But what about Francis the mystic; the man of deep prayer, passion and burning zeal; the man of such total union that he was to indelibly bear Christ's wounds on his body? The holy man who prayed to feel both the pain and the love of Jesus' Passion, and who, we are told, reacted with a mighty shout of joy and pain when his prayer was so overwhelmingly answered... How can you show these moments and movements, visions and seraphs which would normally defy any sort of adequate description?

The great artists seem to have responded to this challenge with light - amber, golden, honeyed or bleached - and dusky shadows, with contrasts between light and darkness, and with intense expressions on Francis' face. (The same is true of depictions of many other saints, plus little details, symbolic of them - such as a monstrance for Clare, or gallows in the background for martyrs). I spent several minutes in front of Murillo's painting of Francis embracing the Crucified Christ - who, in turn, reaches down to embrace him - and thought, not of Francis, but of Ignatius' ardent plea that God would place him with his Son... a grace retreatants pray for during the Exercises. But then I looked, and looked again, at an early Caravaggio, tender and intimate, in a rosy-gold light, showing an angel comforting the just-stigmatised Francis. Brother Leo's account of the giving of the stigmata is highly dramatic, but here there is only stillness, surrender and peace, and a dreamlike quality to Francis' hand, tentatively touching the wound over his heart.

The painting is called St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy... a word often synonymous with rapture and rhapsodies, elation and euphoria. But here we have ecstasy as quiet beatitude and God's tenderness, and the joy and vulnerability and pain of surrender and self-transcendence. Because here we have sanctity, in which, to paraphrase Brother Leo, Jesus has impressed himself, as into a mirrored reflection of himself, with all his love, his beauty, and his grief. And has vanished within him... never to depart.