Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

This compact panel, painted about 1445 to 1450, shows Saint Francis of Assisi kneeling on a rocky hillside as the crucified seraph appears in the sky above him, sending the rays that impress the stigmata on his hands and feet. Domenico Veneziano, one of the most original and least documented painters of the early Florentine Renaissance, here gives the miraculous vision an almost scientific clarity: the landscape is bathed in cool, even light, the rocks and cypresses are observed with a precision that anticipates Piero della Francesca, whose master Domenico may have been. The small scale belies the importance of the work, which is one of the rare surviving panels of a master whose luminous colour transformed Florentine painting in the 1440s. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.