“Of any picture, this is the one that has brought me closest to tears. I may never have actually wept in front of it—it’s been a long time, almost thirty 
years—but I remember standing there, choked up, with a rush of half-formed thoughts swimming in my head. When I was thirteen or fourteen, the Ecstasy of St. Francis was almost too much to look at: I recall thinking I could only take in a few details on each visit. It wasn’t a painting, really: it was a dream of what a painting might be. By comparison other pictures were clumsy illustrations where things were, as Beckett put it, ill seen and ill said. Somehow, the Ecstasy of St. Francis resembled the way I thought. It had the right texture, it pooled in the right places. When I looked, it was as if words had been swept out of my head and replaced by brushstrokes and colors. The word “magical” doesn’t do justice to what I felt, but then again I can hardly remember what I felt: I was attached to the painting in a strange fashion that I have nearly lost the ability to recall.”
Elkins, James. Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2001)