Today, in Lisbon's Madre de Deus church, visitors find a painting by Bento Coelho da Silveira, created in 1650. It is part of a cycle of images devoted to the lives of Saints Francis and Clara (fig. 184). The work depicts the dream of St. Francis, but not as presented in the saint's hagiography. In the vita accounts, the young Francis is still engaged in worldly things and dreams of a palace full of weapons and armor. In the midst of the vision, he hears a voice instructing him to abandon his military aspirations. In another episode in the saint's life, a crucifix summons Francis to renovate the dilapidated church.

In Coelho's painting, the dream vision of an armament-filled palace is combined with the Miracle of the Crucifix. As we have seen, this combination was widely promulgated in mid-seventeenth-century Portugal in another context: that of the Vision of Ourique, part and parcel of Portugal's founding mythology (figs. 77, 127–30). We find the discarded weapons in the left foreground, and there as well is a crucifix looking down upon the narrative's protagonist. The representation of St. Francis is thus linked interpictorially with the iconography of Portuguese political providentialism; or, in other words, the Portuguese Restoration's image worlds encroach on other pictorial themes.