The National Gallery in London will exhibit some unusual objects next week for an art museum. A piece of tattered brown cloth and a rope belt, allegedly over 800 years old, will feature among fine loans from public and private collections, as well as the museum’s own paintings, such as Sassetta and Sandro Botticelli.
The exhibition is also accompanied by a message from the pope, welcoming the first exhibition in the UK dedicated to Francis of Assisi, the saint whom he describes as “God’s beloved minstrel”. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the saint’s name as his own when he became Pope Francis, and went on to quote the magnificent Canticle of the Sun, in which Francis kissed the sun, the moon, and even Sister Death in as a family.
He was beaten by his dismayed father for giving up his beautiful clothes to embrace poverty
The man nicknamed Il Poverello – “the poor boy” – has also inspired artists: the exhibition will include works from across the centuries to the text by Richard Long and the river mud painting made especially for the exhibition to mark the artist’s walk in the landscape of the saint.
by Francisco de Zurbaran Saint Francis in meditation (1635-39) © The National Gallery, London
The exhibition’s organizers, National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi and museum of art and religion curator Joost Joustra, believe Francis is perhaps the most depicted and written about of all the saints. Unlike the early saints entangled in legend and folklore, he was unmistakably a real man, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in Assisi in 1181, the son of a cloth merchant beaten by his dismayed father for giving up his fine clothes to kiss poverty. His own writings survive, and a fourteenth-century copy of some of them, with a small drawing, comes from Assisi.
Two years after his death in 1226, he was canonized, the first paintings were made, the first lives written, and the first Franciscan missionaries sent to England. Within a century there were images of Francis in churches across Europe, scrawny in his patched robe or a more endearing figure preaching to the birds, or shaking hands with a wolf and ordering it to stop eating. the inhabitants of Gubbio.
Giotto’s fresco cycle in the enormous Basilica of Assisi is often credited with launching the Italian Renaissance, and Francis’s message of poverty, service and simplicity – overwhelmed during his lifetime by explosive growth and wealth of the order he founded – even inspired a 1980 Marvel comic. Finaldi, in his catalog introduction, describes him as appealing “to Christians and non-Christians alike, to utopians and revolutionaries, for animal lovers and for those who work for causes of human solidarity.
Alberto Burri Sacco (1953) © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello; Photo: Alessandro Sarteanesi
The roughly sewn brown cloth, folded into a gilt reliquary in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, is one of many believed to have belonged to Francis. These modest relics have inspired many artists and works in the exhibition, including that of Alberto Burri Sacchi (bags) paintings, which were exhibited in 1975 in Assisi, and the life-size figure of Antony Gormley made of heavily welded lead panels, pierced to suggest the stigmata of Christ’s crucifixion wounds.
The very intensity of devotion to Francis has sometimes aroused suspicion. In 1853, when the National Gallery purchased Saint Francis in meditation (1635-39) by Francisco de Zurbarán, one critic described it as “a repulsive little blackboard”. On the other hand, that of Stanley Spencer St Francis and the birdscoming from the Tate and showing a burly monk with a herd following him, was deemed insufficiently respectful and rejected by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1935.
by Stanley Spencer St Francis and the birds (1935) was rejected for the 1935 Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition for necessary disrespect
© Tate/Tate Images
The exhibit was originally proposed by curator Minna Moore Ede, who has since left, and was postponed due to the pandemic. The delay, however, allowed time to include a painting that resurfaced in a private US collection after an appeal in The arts journal in April 2021. Saint Francis and the celestial melody (1904) by Frank Cadogan Cowper – dubbed “the last Pre-Raphaelite” – is described by Finaldi as an “eccentric, supernaturally clear and very English” vision of a saint for all seasons.
• Saint Francis of AssisiNational Gallery, London, 6 May-30 July
