Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, 'Saint Louis of Toulouse', probably 1530-5

This panel of Saint Louis of Toulouse and one of 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 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 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 some time after that the paintings were sold. 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 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 Louis of Toulouse in his bishop’s robes holding a Bible; his cope is decorated with the French fleur-de-lis. Saint Louis of Toulouse was son of the King of Naples. When the King was taken prisoner in Italy, he secured his own freedom by handing over his three sons as hostages. The boys were held captive for seven years and educated by Franciscan friars. While in captivity, Louis took up the study of philosophy and theology and was made Archbishop of Lyon. After the death of his older brother, Louis became heir to his father’s kingdom. When he was freed that same year, Louis went to Rome and renounced his royal inheritance, taking the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience of the Franciscan Order. He was consecrated Bishop of Toulouse in 1297. He served the poor and fed the hungry but after only six months as Bishop he abandoned the position, dying six months later; he was canonised in 1317. Saint Louis was included in the decorative programme for the ceiling of the Scuola di S. Francesco due to his importance to the Franciscan Order, by whom he was particularly venerated.