San Francesco Saverio battezza gli asiatici
Saint Francis Xavier Baptising Asians
18th century, oil on canvas.
The canvas, located in the right arm of the transept of the Church of Soccorso, is unsigned but is similar in its formal layout and colour brilliance to the Triumph of St. Ignatius, which is why it was attributed to Giuseppe Mauro by Giorgio Flaccavento. Both works refer to the chromatic taste of Solimena, a Neapolitan painter whose compositional methods spread throughout southern Italy in the 18th century. St Francis Xavier, a friend of St Ignatius, was the first to spread Christianity in Asia, reaching as far as China and Japan. He is depicted above right, together with a brother holding a cross, while baptising a man and a woman in elegant robes. On the ground, close to the baptismal font, a crown makes us imagine that the baptisers could be people of rank. The isolated figures, treated in bright colours and plastic forms, are rendered through robust drapery. The elegant robes of the figures, treated with a taste for detail in certain details such as the stole of Francis Xavier or the arabesques of the woman in the foreground, echo the elegance of the robes of Europa and Asia in the Triumph of St. Ignatius.
Born in 1506 into the noble Basque family of Xavier in Navarre, Francis moved to Paris in 1525 to pursue his studies, becoming magister artium. In Paris he found himself close to Ignatius of Loyola, a fellow student and lodger. For a long time he resisted the great attraction that Ignatius and his choice exerted on him, until in 1534, on Assumption Day, he too found himself with the first Jesuits at Montmartre to consecrate himself to God forever.
Leaving for Palestine, he had to stop in Venice, the Holy Land being inaccessible because of the Muslim Turks, and here, ordained a priest at the age of 31, he devoted himself with Ignatius to drafting the constitutions of the Society of Jesus. He then reached Rome with his companions. Francis, with the papal appointment of apostolic nuncio, left for the Far East. In 1542 he first landed in Mozambique and then reached Goa, the capital of the Indies, where he began his mission of evangelisation. He then took the Gospel to Sri Lanka, to Malacca, where he met the first Japanese, and to the Moluccas. Animated by an ardent missionary zeal, he reached southern Japan in 1548. He went as far as China where he died in Sangchuan, on the night between 2 and 3 December 1552. He was canonised in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.
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