These two panels are said to have come from a ceiling in the Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari at Venice. The ceiling originally featured the Four Evangelists on square panels at the corners, with Saints Bonaventure, Louis, Bernardino and Anthony of Padua in separate octagonal compartments around a central full length image of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. The central panel of Saint Francis is lost but the Four Evangelists, Saint Bernardino and Saint Anthony are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
The National Gallery’s panels show Saint Louis of Toulouse in his bishop’s robes holding a Bible, and Saint Bonaventure pointing upwards. They are characteristic works of Pordenone’s late style and closely comparable with his Beato Lorenzo Giustiniani altarpiece (Accademia, Venice) commissioned in 1532, so were probably made at a similar time.
These two panels of Saint Louis of Toulouse and Saint Bonaventure are said to have come from a ceiling in the Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari at Venice. The Venetian Scuole, or confraternities, were charitable and religious organisations for the laity and were important patrons of the arts, commissioning cycles of paintings to decorate the walls and ceilings of their meeting rooms. The Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari was a confraternity dedicated to the veneration of Saint Francis and attached to the church of the Frari; its fifteenth-century building stood at the west end of the Campo dei Frari.
These two panels are connected with a series of nine pictures by Pordenone described by the seventeenth-century art critic Boschini as made for a ground floor room in that building. The room must have been small, judging by the scale of the surviving pictures. The original arrangement of the ceiling is described as the Four Evangelists on square panels, with Saints Bonaventure, Louis, Bernardino and Anthony of Padua in separate octagonal compartments around a central full-length image on a smaller scale of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. In his Descrizione of 1733, describing all the public paintings in Venice, Antonio Maria Zanetti reports that the paintings had been moved into an upper room as they were deteriorating in their original site. The central panel of Saint Francis is lost but the Four Evangelists, Saint Bernardino and Saint Anthony are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
Each of the surviving panels depicts a tightly cropped bust-length imposing male figure. The perspective of the background in the square pictures of the Four Evangelists suggests that they would have been in the corners of the ceiling. The mouldings behind the evangelists’ heads form corners which would have been intended to blend with the corners of the room. The four Franciscan saints on the octagonal panels would have been positioned at the sides. The foreshortened walls behind each figure functioned as imaginary extensions of the room’s real walls.
The National Gallery’s panels show Saint Louis of Toulouse in his bishop’s robes holding a Bible, and Saint Bonaventure pointing to heaven. The panels are characteristic works of Pordenone’s late style and closely comparable with his Beato Lorenzo Giustiniani altarpiece (Accademia, Venice) commissioned in 1532, so were probably made at a similar time.
