"But what will they say?", the American magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) asked while standing in front of his sublime works of art. He saw them as “living entities” capable of communicating with the viewer pausing to contemplate them from one of the sofas in the elegant, new building between Madison and Fifth Avenue in New York. This is where he welcomed his visitors, in stylish surroundings that were conducive to the study of his collection. He later donated it to the public, inspired as a young man by what Wallace had done with his collection in London. In the Living Hall of the Frick mansion, the heart of the five-million dollar residence built between 1913 and 1914, the intense dialogue between the luxurious interiors and the exterior springs to life through the three large windows over-looking Fifth Avenue, Central Park and the magnolias; the same view shared by the visitor and the cerulean eyes of the house’s original owner. The mansion is set among the luxurious villas on Millionaire’s Row and was built and designed by the same architects as the New York Public Library. It reflects the English style of the eighteenth century “with a hint of Italian spirit.” Born in Pennsylvania to a family of farmers, Frick became a pioneer in the coke and steel industry – at the age of thirty he had alreadyamassed a huge fortune, some of which he invested in works of art. His journey to Europe in around 1880 together with his friend, Andrew Mellon, the future great collector and founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, played a key role. The latter was the son of the banker Thomas Mellon, and it was to his institute that the young Frick turned for a loan, giving the impression of being “a little too enthusiastic about paintings, but not enough to cause any damage.” With time, the number of masterpieces in the collection grew. All the works were in good condition and well suited to the overall harmony of the collection.

Meanwhile, Frick became oneof the major shareholders of the railways, which he considered as “the Rembrandts of the investments.” Various other famous collectors were also interested in the sector, and they were so wealthy that an economist of that period actually called them “the owners of the United States.” One of these was William Henry Vanderbilt. And it is one of the Vanderbilt residences, still on Fifth Avenue, that Frick rented and moved to with his family and works of art. He lived there from 1905 to 1914 by which time his new house was completed “light and airy and spacious.” The arrangement of the Living Hall has remained unaltered, with its oak panelled walls, porcelain, priceless furniture, rugs, and paintings by Holbein, El Greco and Titian , which stand out next to small Renaissance bronzes, and where Giovanni Bellini’s mysterious Saint Francis still shines. Henry Clay Frick bought this painting in 1915 from Knoedler’s in New York. Bellini’s Saint Francis had just spent three turbulent years, between London and New York, passing from merchants, auction houses and galleries: from Robert Langton Douglas (1912), it went to Colnaghi’s & Knoedler’s (1912), then to Arthur M.Grenfell (1912-13), and finally, to the other side of the ocean to Knoedler’s (1913-15). The painting’s previous sixty years had been far more peaceful. Indeed, from 1852 to 1912 it remained in England in Tittenhurst Lodge, Sunninghill, in Berkshire. It was, at first, the property of Capitan Joseph Dingwall, who bought it through from Christie’s in London on June 19, 1852 from an anonymous. The following year Morris Moore accused the London National Gallery of letting the painting slip through their fingers. The Louvre had also set their eyes on it. In 1869 Thomas Holloway (1800-83), a producer and salesman of pharmaceutical specialities and art collector, bought Tittenhurst and its contents. Childless, he founded a psychiatric hospital and, with the encouragement of his wife, Jane Driver, a college for female higher education (well documented in the University Archives of London). The Saint Francis was then inherited in turn by his sisters-in-law – Mary Ann Driver, and later Sarah, who married George Martin in 1857 and who helped complete Thomas Holloway’s projects (his surname was added to hers in 1884). The Holloway Sanatorium opened in 1885 and the Royal Holloway College was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in 1886. When Lady Sarah Martin-Holloway died (around 1911), the Saint Francis left Sunninghill forever. It had arrived in Great Britain in around 1845, probably through William Buchanan who is thought to have purchased it in Italy. Before that, traces of the painting had been lost, with the exception of its supposed provenance from Palazzo Corner, some time prior to 1795-96 (this is confirmed in the Getty Provenance Index Databases). There was, therefore, a gap lasting almost three centuries until 1525 – when Marcantonio Michiel first registered the painting in the valuable manuscript of the Notizia d’opera di disegno, today in the Marciana Library. With reference to the aristocrat Taddeo Contarini in Venice, it reports, “the oil painting of Saint Francis in the Desert, the work of Zuan Bellini, commissioned by Messier Zuan Michiel has a landscape that is favourably finished and admirably elegant.” From this, we also have the name of the first owner. Some of the archive documents we have found contributed to the final reconstruction of the possible passages of ownership: from the Contarini to the Giustinian family, to the last heirs including Alba, the widow of Zuanne Giustinian, a descendant of the attorney Giulio and wife of Nicolò Corner. It is in the possession of Giulio Giust inian him self that Marco Boschini reports Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini in his Carta del navegar pitoresco in 1660. Other works include Three Female Figures by Palma il Vecchio, previously the property of Taddeo Contarini and today in the Dre s d e n Gemäldegalerie . In the painting of Saint Francis, Boschini also describes a Christ in the form of a seraph, frequently depicted in paintings of the Saint’s stigmatisation: “Christ who appears in Heaven in the form of an ardent Seraph , ”the red-winged creature “that burns” (the name is said to derive from saraph, to burn). In particular, Boschini’s description and the absence of the seraph in the painting in New York misled critics into not authenticating Frick’s painting, despite the likely and uite considerable modification to the up per part of t he painting hat may have shown the figure of an angel.

Your reconstruction of the changes of ownership, from Taddeo Contarini to the attorney Giulio Giustinian, now makes it uite plausible to identify the Saint Francis described by Boschini as that belonging to Frick, together with the important considerations also regarding the content of the painting. Furthermore, this painting follows a similar path to that of Three Female Figures by Palma il Vecchio – passing from the Contarini’s to the Giustinian’s; then to the Cornaro della Ca’ Granda family, where the Saint Francis is not only mentioned in the Storia Pittorica (1795-96), but also in a travel notebook of the Veneto (the abbot was in enice in May 1794). If, as has been pointed out, Michiel’s “title”, Saint Francis in the Desert, is the most fitting for Bellini’s painting, we find the exact same wording used to describe the painting in the Frick Collection. The same title appears in the catalogue of the famous Art Treasures of the United Kingdom exhibition, inaugurated in Manchester on May 5, 1857. Three months earlier, George Scharf, who had been given the task of selecting the Old.

Masters, “discovered” the Saint Francis in Dingwall’s unknown collection. On the occasion of the exhibition in Manchester, the great connoisseur Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle also studied the painting and made valuable sketches that are now in the Marciana Library; sketches which confirm that in 1857 the painting was identical to how it presents itself today, well after any changes may have been made to the upper part. With the lively pictorial interplay of light, the “duo lumina,” and its “landscape that is favourably finished and admirably elegant,” with its intense concentration of “human and divine,” Bellini’s Saint Francis, draws the gaze of the observer who, while admiring it on the all of the Living Hall, perhaps asks himself the same vibrant uestions that once inspired Henry Clay Frick.