LONDON – What can the saints really mean to us now, a powerful gathering of rude and rowdy non-devotees? In an exhibition titled Saints alive!British artist Michael Landy, in residence at the National Gallery in London between 2010 and 2013, turned them into amusing figures, giant, kinetic beings who beat their chests with such fury that their noisy bodies nearly collapsed.
But what about the saints in particular? What about Saint Francis, that selfless nurturer of birds and animals? Doesn’t he deserve to be remembered fondly? Artists have certainly treated it with great respect over the centuries. Saint Francis of Assisi, a new exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery that sweeps us through panel paintings from the 13th to the 21st centuries, including Sassetta, Caravaggio, Murillo, Botticelli, El Greco and many more, seems to almost confirm this fact. Here is the saint (born in 1181/2), gentle, humble in the extreme, always the giver rather than the taker.
It is the haunting hooded cowl that serves as the focal point in Francisco de Zurbarán’s ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’, painted in Seville between 1635 and 1639. The saint is kneeling and alone in his stone cell, the epitome of rupture and abnegation. . He clutches a skull that is tilted (by the one who clutches it so fervently) to look at it without eyes. His mouth is wide open, his eyes barely visible, his coat in tatters at the elbow – this is the man whose name was the poor (the poor) of Assisi.
The saint’s life had much to do with bodily pain, and many paintings show his receiving the stigmata of Christ in his palms as strong evidence of his calling. Oddly enough, we viewers often don’t register much of this pain ourselves when looking at many of these early paintings because they are so sweet to behold – the glorious color combinations of Sassetta’s painted panel cycle , For example. One could almost say that there is too much sweetness in some of these early responses; Botticelli shows him engulfed by winged angels with their instruments, treading the golden ground of celestial air. Such stagings lessen the pain and almost seem to aestheticize the saint.
The exhibition is staged to incline us gently towards restraint, homage and a certain pious reflection. As we enter, the dimly lit galleries jut straight ahead, then jut out left and right, first appearing in the shape of a Greek or Roman cross, in the basilica style. And then there is the nature of the audience. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the subject matter, that many of those walking around the afternoon of my visit were elderly. They advance slowly, and very precisely, towards what they want to see. It looks like some sort of ancient pilgrimage. Only the trappings of modernity – clothes, watches, telephones, etc. – are different.
The appearance of a sack-like piece of old material, with a winding belt of hemp, wedged inside an impossibly luxurious gold frame, is what brings the audience into a slightly different state of mind. . It is, we are told, the real habit worn by Saint Francis, “patched over time.” What a survivor! He belongs to the Community of Friars Minor Conventual of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
So we have it at last: shining proof of the harshness and difficulties of his life. Then, in the 1950s, Alberto Burri produced a “painting” entitled “Sacco” (1953), made from a patchwork of bags and fabrics, with an emphatic red oil disc. The Arte Povera movement takes up the saint – think of the very “poverty” of their chosen materials. Giuseppe Penone finds affinities between the life of Saint Francis and his own attitude towards artistic creation, how the principles of poverty and rigor practiced by the saint allow him to rethink his own physical presence in relation to an organic being such as a TREE.
Other unusual developments begin in the second half of the 20th century. The idea of St. Francis takes on muscle, power and strength like never before, for two reasons. First, his image begins to be associated with liberation theology and its empowerment of the individual body and soul. Then, in 1980, came the ultimate blessing of modernity: Marvel Comics erected him as an exemplary warrior of good, a man of action with superhero status, by telling his life in Francis, brother of the universe, in which he goes from being a teenage party animal to a tonsured monk. Its most dramatic scene shows Saint Francis receiving the stigmata as sparkling rays shoot from Christ’s wounds.
Nietzsche, who often cursed the miserable weakness of the Christian god, would surely have approved of this rise to power of Christianity.
Saint Francis of Assisi continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London, England) until July 30. The exhibition was curated by Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery and Joost Joustra, Ahmanson Research Associate curator in Art and Religion at the National Gallery.
