Jonathan Jones
Wed 3 May 2023 9:42 EDT
In medieval Italy, a wealthy young man called Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, son of a silk merchant, threw off his worldly identity to become the wandering preacher known to history as Francis of Assisi. Happy in his poverty, communing with nature, speaking to birds, praising Brother Sun and Sister Moon, his radical, joyous version of Christianity challenged a church that had become a system of power and wealth.
You don’t need to believe to believe in Saint Francis. Francis was the real thing, as innocent and poetic as his portraits, to judge by a letter he wrote to his friend Brother Leo that’s on display in the National Gallery’s enraptured exhibition about this inspiring figure. And his vision is as urgent as it was 800 years ago, seen in surprising finds including a medieval feminist fresco of Poor Clares, as the female Franciscan order was called, and a silvered horn given to Francis as a symbol of peace by Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.
Saint Francis of Assisi is co-curated by the National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi. Considering his job, he’s refreshingly free from art snobbery. The show celebrates the sentimentality and artistic beauty Saint Francis inspires: as if you’d wandered into a baroque church in Naples where great art hovers amid candles, incense and grisly effigies. It includes a Marvel comic entitled Francis Brother of the Universe among paintings by El Greco and Fra Angelico. At first I thought: “What desperate stuff.” And do we really need to be greeted by an Antony Gormley statue spreading its arms and gazing heavenward? Yet it’s a valid inclusion, because it replicates the stance of the enraptured saint in a painting by Bellini.
The exhibition includes actual relics. The brown sackcloth habit and hempen belt that Francis is said to have worn are here, lent by the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. This matted fabric is juxtaposed with a 1953 abstract artwork Sacco, or Sack, by Alberto Burri, whose layers of worn sacking are perforated by a red circle that could be bloody stigmata.
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