Saint Vincent Ferreri (1350-1419), in Dominican habit, is portrayed in the act of preaching, while pointing to heaven with his right hand and with his left holding an open book, in which is written the admonition Timete Deum Date Illi honorem. Among the onlookers at his feet is lying a half-naked young man caught with his back to her, and to the right a woman nursing a child as she turns her gaze to the saint.
Because of the character of his itinerant preaching and addressed to large numbers of people from all walks of life, Vincent – who called for penance, reform of morals and genuine conversion to prepare for the final judgment – was called the angel of the apocalypse, hence the wings in his iconographic representation.
The painting, of excellent quality, expresses itself with a wiggly, vibrant painting and an ironic grace unusual in a sacred theme that refer to the spirited style of the Flemish Guglielmo Borremans, a painter born in Antwerp and active in Sicily since 1714. He introduced into the local artistic milieu a profane taste foreign to 18th-century Sicilian figurative culture but now widespread in major European centers.
The painting was perhaps commissioned in the early decades of the 1700s by Bishop Pietro Vincenzo Platamone, a Dominican, for the cathedral church where he had an altar erected dedicated to the saint whose devotion had already been widespread in the islands since the 16th century, however, when the diocese of Lipari was led by bishops of Iberian origin who spread the cult.
