The painter friend of Goethe who fled from Naples to discover the picturesque charm of La Verna
by Attilio Brilli La Verna is the most impressive of the Franciscan hermitages in which one can meet the face of nature, a nature in which Francis and his brothers have perceived the manifestation of the divine. As happens in the Franciscan hermitages in whose caves the followers of Francis go to “imprison” themselves, La Verna includes the Saint’s Grotto, its Stone Bed, the Sasso Spicco and other icy caverns and colossal boulders. These are the places that Francis’ admirers, such as the Alsatian Paul Sabatier, the English Julien Green and Beryl de Selincourt, or the Danish Johann Johergensen, perceived as a manifestation of holiness imprinted in the scenery of a primeval and powerful nature. “Here the terrible face of nature reigns”, wrote the Scotsman Joseph Forsyth in 1802 on a visit to La Verna during his trip to Italy. The writer reviews precipices crowned at the top by centuries-old woods, cracks in the rock “where curiosity shudders at the mere idea of leaning”, “spirited” caves to which the crosses confer renewed sanctity, long stairs carved in the living boulder that with relief bring back the visitor in daylight. In conclusion of the visit to the Sasso Spicco, Forsyth provides us with valuable and interesting information. In fact, he notes: “This scenario is now available to the brush of Jakob Philipp Hackert, the Prussian whose love for art led from the land of the Vandals to delight Italy with its landscapes”. The reference is to the sacred caverns depicted by the painter in two large, memorable canvases: The cave of San Francesco alla Verna from the outside, of the Folkwang Museum in Essen and The cave of San Francesco from the inside, of the Städelsches Kunstintitut in Frankfurt. Hackert is the greatest eighteenth-century landscape painter who, having arrived in Italy in 1768, settled in Rome and then in Naples where, introduced at court by the ambassador …