Wim Wenders In Ecstasy

Movie director Wim Wenders enthuses over Bellini’s “Saint Francis in Ecstasy,” at the Frick Collection in NYC: ‘I had never thought a 15th-century painter could have created such a sight: so vivid, surprising and utterly modern. There’s no other painting in which I have seen a person standing there so stunned, so completely in awe, so dazed, bewildered and shocked as this figure. Yet what he’s looking at is simple: the sky, trees, animals, a city on a hill, rocks… “the creation”, but in a light that is out of this world. I stood in front of this painting with my mouth open, just as ecstatic as its main man.’

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