The director of the National Gallery speaks to Melanie McDonagh about their new exhibition.
It’s almost 800 years since St Francis of Assisi died at the age of 44, but the man who preached to the birds and made friends with the wolf remains perhaps the most universally appealing Catholic saint. Next month a show opens at the National Gallery in London which traces his life and legend and legacy in art all the way through those eight centuries to our own day – it opens with Anthony Gormley’s starkly simple figure in lead and fibreglass and includes some of the very earliest depictions. There will be Franciscan friars from Assisi and from London and Oxford at the launch, to prove that the legacy is living and human as well as artistic.
And, as befits the saint who loved the poor, it will be free.
The director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, is the chief curator of the exhibition. He’s struck by the breadth of Francis’s appeal: “there are lots of reasons”, he says. “There’s his embryonic environmentalism, and his love of animals (the Brits love that); then he’s got something to say about social justice and the dignity of the poor, and about dialogue between religions (he himself conversed with the Sultan) which is important in our day. He’s a saint for all seasons.”
The association between Francis and art is evident from the start. “His conver-sion,” Finaldi says, “began with a painted crucifix in the church of San Damiano, which spoke to him. He described himself as a panel painting – the panel itself isn’t important; it’s what it reflects. And the imagery associated with Francis is very pictorial – dreams, apparitions, an image talking.”
He counted the number of representations of Francis in the National Gallery and found 18 in the Sainsbury wing for medieval art alone. “After the gospel saints and the martyrs, Francis is probably the most represented of all the saints. He’s very strong for the arts; think Cimabue, Giotto, Zurbarán.”
He continues: “If you met a film maker looking for a script, Francis’s legend is full of representable stories. There’s a great tradition of them.” And indeed, the show is strong on excerpts from films on Francis – Zeferelli’s is full of beautiful shots. Come to that, there’s a Marvel comic representation of Francis – “he gets the stigmata – POW!”
The exhibition starts with modern work. “Contemporary artists still find Francis fas-cinating,” says Finaldi. “They don’t neces-sarily illustrate the stories about Francis but there are themes that they engage with. There’s the Franciscan inspiration in work by Anthony Gormley and Andrea Büttner, an artist who’s focused on poverty and shame.” For the show, the National Gallery commissioned Richard Long (whose art is made from walking in landscapes) to spend a week in the country around Assisi for a work inspired by Francis’s time spent criss-crossing the Umbrian countryside on foot.
Which works are his favourites? “I’m thrilled by the Murillo from Seville, and the Gormley, the first body-cast sculpture based on a beautiful Francis by Bellini, and a Portuguese 17th-century painter, Guiseppe de Obidos, showing Francis and St Clare celebrating at the crib – because it was Fran-cis, of course, who gave us the first crib.”
There will be two relics, or relic-like pieces, in the exhibition: the ivory horn to call the faithful to prayer, which was a gift from the Sultan of Egypt to Francis, and which he used on his return to Italy, and a habit of Francis’s from the church of Santa Croce in Florence. “These are objects with innate sacredness,” Finaldi says. “The habit speaks to the life of poverty that he led in following Christ; the horn speaks of his respectful relations with Muslims.”
Some people will come to venerate the relics and Finaldi doesn’t see that as a prob-lem. “Francis is such a rich and complex character,” he says. “Some will see him as an historical figure, some as a religious fig-ure. Cardinal Nichols will speak at the open-ing of the exhibition. There’s great excite-ment among Franciscans about it. This is a journey across eight centuries of art from 13th-century manuscripts until now. But you can’t do an exhibition on Francis without talking about the saint and the religious fig-ure and acknowledging that he’s the inspira-tion of any number of religious movements.” Finaldi is himself a Catholic, and was famil-iar with the stories called The Little Flowers of St Francis when he was growing up.
Francis is an important historical figure, and what we may not realise in Britain, says Finaldi, is that this is something of a golden age of Franciscan studies, especially on the Continent. The exhibition catalogue includes an essay by the venerable scholar of sainthood Andre Vauchez, who discusses sources from the time of Francis which were found only four or five years ago in Paris.
There’s also a section on St Clare, the young Assisi noblewoman who followed Francis into religious life, only she lived her vocation out in an enclosed convent, while his friars went out into the world. “Francis himself was very maternal to his own friars, and often allowed them to call him ‘moth-er’,” he says. “By contrast he was very insis-tent about “Do not call anyone ‘Father’”, except for the heavenly father. He took the evangelical counsels very seriously. He broke with his own father when he wanted to hold him back. Divesting himself of his father’s clothes” – Francis stripped off his clothes in front of the bishop’s palace in Assisi – “was the point of no return.” It all sounds terrifically modern.
Finaldi is keen to remind us of Francis’s radicalism. “I wanted to illustrate the significance of Francis for Latin American and revolutionary muralists of Mexico – some of the prominent liberation theologians were Franciscans.”
It promises to be a terrific exhibition. Some of Francis’s followers will be coming to see it. “There’s the joy of Francis evident in Franciscans,” observes Finaldi. And that is, perhaps, the best exhibit of all.
St Francis of Assisi opens at the National Gallery on May 6.
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