Of the 302 works collected by Francisco de Benavides Dávila y Corella, IX Count of Santisteban, during his viceroyalty of Naples, 42 were devotional images with portraits or stories of saints, reaching 66 if we add those of saints and blessed (Cerezo, 2005). Among them, Italian saints and founders of monastic orders predominated.
This work is both an idealised portrait of the founder of the order of Minims, whose motto he wears on his breast, and a devotional history of his most famous and prodigious miracle, the one in which, when Francis of Paola had to cross the Strait of Messina with one of his brothers and the boatman refused to transport them free of charge, he withdrew in prayer and immediately blessed the sea, spread his cloak over the waves, climbed onto it, invited his brother to mount it and together they crossed the channel. Giordano resolves this hagiographic episode in a very synthetic manner, omitting the detail that the saint wrapped the end of his cloak around his staff in the form of a sail, perhaps for compositional reasons or to emphasise the miraculous nature of the crossing or, more probably, to assimilate the scene to an apotheosis of the saint.
On another plane, in the left-hand margin, marked, as is usual in Giordano, by a more subdued, monochrome colour range and a more imprecise drawing, he narrates a complement to the story of the miracle, in which the sailors of the boat that had denied him passage, amazed by the miracle, shout out to him to get on board, an invitation that the saint ignores, concentrating on the glory that such a portentous act returns to God.
It is worth remembering that the IX Count of Santisteban, before occupying the viceroyalty of Naples, governed the kingdom of Sicily, of which, since 1630, by decision of Pope Urban VIII, this Calabrian hermit, canonised in 1519 and a model of heroic penance for the Church of the Counter-Reformation, was patron saint.
