Ben Stephens enjoys a magnificent, well-balanced and sensitive exhibition about St Francis of Assisi.
Having asked where in the building I might find the National Gallery’s most recently-opened exhibition, a kind attendant smiled at me with a look of benevolent patience which I assume he reserves for visiting idiots and members of the press. Gesturing just over my shoulder he pointed out a feature wall running the whole length of the downstairs cafe and emblazoned with “Saint Francis of Assisi” in large golden letters.
I took a moment to survey it over a cup of coffee – cappuccino, obviously – and a pastry. A selection of faux-greenery (of the kind that model-railway enthusiasts use to evoke grass and trees) looks much like a rainforest from above – or a bougie shop in Chelsea during the Flower Show. Just inside, the exhibition’s eponymous subject stands with arms outstretched over the countryside around Assisi.
At first glance, then, it all seems very Laudato Si’. Certainly St Fran-cis’s “Canticle of the Sun” features, written in large letters across one wall. But it appears in full, with its thanksgiving to God for His creation – “Praise be to You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth” – giving way to the bit that people often choose to forget: “Woe to those who die in mort- al sin.” This is a magnificent exhibit-ion, but it is a serious one as well.
This should hardly be a surprise, for one of its curators is Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery; the other is Joost Joustra, the NG’s Howard & Robert Ahmanson research curator. Finaldi really gets religious subjects, and how to present them – and so the Francis we meet here is the root-and-branch Francis who padded the Umbrian hills calling sinners to repentance and conversion of life.
That is not to say that the other Francis – the co-opted one – does not appear as well. One of the headings under which the curators present him is “Radical Francis”, as he is perhaps better known and recognised today: “He is considered by many to be a patron saint, or an ally, of causes related to social justice, interreligious dialogue, socialism, feminism, the animal-rights movement and ecology, among others.”
The show takes visitors back to basics, rooting Francis firmly in his time and in his culture: from his birth at the start of the 1180s through his hapless military career, his religious transformation in 1205-1206, the initial approval of his community life in 1209, his journey to the Holy Land in 1219, his receipt of the stigmata in 1224, his death in 1226 and his swift canonisation by Gregory IX in 1228.
All this it does through some of the most exquisite artefacts related to Francis that the world knows. Sassetta’s Scenes from the Life of St Francis, dating from the first half of the 15th century, are his masterpiece; they were originally commissioned as an altarpiece for the church dedicated to their subject in San Sepolcro in Arezzo. The story of his life and death is told in full technicolour; a hundred years on he was already Francis the alter Christus.
Later depictions are immediately recognisable: St Francis receiving the Stigmata by El Greco; St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy by Caravaggio; St Francis Embracing the Crucified Christ by Murillo. To be able to see them so close up increases their intimacy, however; Zurburán’s St Francis in Meditation – with its patched habit and skull, face half in shadow and mouth slightly open – becomes almost overwhelming.
Other works may be less familiar, but they are no less impressive for it. Antony Gormley’s Untitled (for Francis) of 1985 adopts the posture of so many earlier depictions – arms slightly out, head slightly back – but looks like a suit of armour with holes. And then you realise that the holes are in the shape of eyes, and correspond exactly to the Five Wounds. It be-comes Everyman: a carapace pierced with the gaze of the suffering Christ.
Craigie Aitchison’s tiny St Francis of 1993 appears without stigmata, but with a floating lavender cross over his heart; he has no girdle but instead wears a long rosary at his waist rather like the Dominicans do. So how do we know it is Francis? Well, the green hill on which he stands and the deep blue sky behind with a single low-slung star, and the two birds in his hands – which are called doves but look more like terns – seem to be enough.
Other animals abound. Merson’s Wolf of Gubbio represents the schmaltzy, Victorian view of Francis; after a blessing and appeal to his better nature Francis turned the ferocious creature into a docile pet who was thereafter adored and cared for by the townspeople. The little girl stroking his back while he is fed a scrap of meat by a kindly butcher has shades of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of peace. Its lupine halo seems a bit much.
And then there are the birds. So many birds, all paying attention while Francis ministers to them. Andrea Büttner’s woodcut of 2010 draws ob-viously on a panel of the 13th-century Bardi Dossal in Santa Croce in Flor-ence. Stanley Spencer, meanwhile, presents an unusually plump and grey-bearded Francis leading an English-farmyard procession of ducks and hens while blackbirds and thrushes warm themselves on a sun-drenched red-tiled roof.
St Clare gets a look in, too – and rightly so, being the first of Francis’s nuns and the founder of her own religious order for women. In the room dedicated to her and to the beginning of the intentional Franciscan life is also the show’s crowning glory: a habit of Francis himself, in its baroque reliquary and inside a thick glass case. All it needs is a votive stand in front of it, with candles and a box for money.
The end of the exhibition takes Francis into the media age: large frames containing Arthur Boyd’s lithographic Scenes from the Life of St Francis (1965) and more of Büttner’s woodcuts: her huge Beggars (2016). Alongside them sits Francis, Brother of the Universe, Marvel Comic’s 1980 interpretation of the saint with “the full superhero treatment” at the moment of his stigmatisation.
Francis, then, has in one way or another captured imaginations in each generation since his death; most recently a reigning pope has for the first time taken his name. Through this show the National Gallery amply demonstrates that it still knows how to treat religious subjects, and also that there remains popular demand for their balanced and sensitive interpretation.
And what about us? Clearly Francis, if we really get to know him, gives us no easy ride. As the popular Italian actor Totò declares on film in the final room, playing the bemused Fra’ Ciccillo in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s neorealist Uccellacci e Uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows) – of 1966, “these saints can be really demanding.” They certainly can.
St Francis of Assisi is at the National Gallery in London until July 30.
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