Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, 'Saint Bonaventure', probably 1530-5

This panel of Saint Bonaventure and one showing Saint Louis of Toulouse 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 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.

The National Gallery’s 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 Scuola di S. Francesco was demolished at the end of the eighteenth century and it is most likely this event that caused the paintings' sale, after which they were placed in the care of the vicar general of the Franciscan Order. The central panel of Saint Francis is lost but the Four Evangelists, Saint Bernardino and Saint Anthony are now located at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Each of the surviving panels depicts a tightly cropped, imposing bust-length 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 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 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.

This panel shows Saint Bonaventure pointing up, originally towards the central image of Saint Francis; his red cardinal’s hat hangs on the wall behind him. Saint Bonaventure was included in the decorative programme because of his importance to the Franciscan Order. Born in Umbria, he entered the Franciscan order in 1243. His leadership made the Franciscans the most prominent order in the Catholic Church until the coming of the Jesuits. He was made Cardinal Bishop of Albano by Pope Gregory X in 1274 and died shortly afterwards. He was canonised in 1482.