Abstract

Oratorios (of which the librettos have survived, though the music only rarely) and eighteenth-century paintings, portraying Saint Francis, tend to focus on two themes drawn from the Franciscan Sources. One, already popular during the Counter-Reformation, is the saint’s stigmatization; the other, which gains significance in the era of missionary expansion, is the historical encounter in 1219 between Francis and Sultan Malik al-Kamil. The stigmatization is interpreted in the pictorial masterpieces of Giambattista Piazzetta (1729) and Giambattista Tiepolo (1769), as well as in the oratorios by composers Stefano Leporati (1708) and Giovanni Carlo Maria Clari (1718). Meanwhile, the meeting with the Sultan is depicted in the fourteenth chapel of the Sacro Monte of Orta (1756), in the painting at the Prado by Zacarias González Velázquez (1787), and in the anonymous oratorio San Francesco d’Assisi in Egitto (1720).