The “Saint Francis Effect” and the Renaissance

by Elizabeth Lev, appearing in Volume 49

The revolution wrought by Francis of Assisi in his thirteenth-century world still makes its effects felt today. Son of a wealthy merchant, Francis’ radical embrace of poverty is an example to our wildly commercial age; his humility has rebuked centuries of mania for protagonism; and he inspired the 266th successor of Saint Peter to take his name. But amid the many achievements easy to lay at his door, there is a less obvious one: Saint Francis was one of the architects of the Renaissance.

“Preposterous!” you may be thinking, but look closely and you’ll see a fascinating trail of breadcrumbs leading from the poor man of Assisi to a great renaissance in art, one that inspired painters and poets to engage with classical models as well as the natural world. A few scholars, from Henry Thode to G.K. Chesterton, have chronicled how the “Saint Francis effect” not only shaped spirituality, but also the visual arts.

Francis of Assisi was born into a post-Crusades world in 1186, when stability, prosperity, and intellectual activity were coursing back into the capillaries of Italy after a long period of corruption and uncertainty. New educational institutions began dotting the European townscapes, and merchants plied wares from Northern wool to exotic Eastern spices. Italy, in particular, was becoming more urban, with landholders moving into cities to profit from the wealth that could be attained through industry.

For all the social and commercial dynamism, art and spirituality were more stagnant. Popes pleaded with the faithful to receive the Eucharist, increasingly aware that congregations were growing more sceptical of the real presence, and the specter of heresy arose with the Cathars and the Waldensians. The Byzantine influence kept a stranglehold on images, with wide-eyed icons conveying immutable truth with their rigid compositions, stiff lines, minimal variations on themes, and lack of movement in the representations. Their focus, dating back from the time of Arius’ challenge to Christ’s divine nature, was to underscore that Jesus was God, and did so through abstract distant images.

Saint Francis’ life story, essentially a rich kid working his way up the medieval yuppie ladder who discovered meaning, purpose, and joy by renouncing material goods for Christ, resonated with this age. The stories of his conversion and mission captured the imagination of the era and fired up enthusiasm to picture a life of Christ on earth in their own time. Francis’ stigmata, the first to be bestowed since apostolic times, bespoke the heavenly approval of this Christ-like incarnation. In our day, his life would have called out for a movie version. But in the Middle Ages, instead of film, there was fresco. And in recounting the events of this surprising saint, art made quantum leaps for the first time in centuries. The greatest visible changes were a return of nature into the visual arts and the creation of pictorial space to set a stage for the stories to be told. Both of these factors were tied to a burgeoning interest in the human experience of Christ on earth.

It was Saint Francis who gave the world the crèche scene, the indispensable feature of our Christmas celebrations. Preaching in the little town of Greccio, the power of his words and the clarity of his adoration rendered the birth of Christ visible before the eyes of the assembly. This emphasis on the bodily reality of Jesus would lead to a rediscovery of the centrality of the body in art, a hallmark of the Renaissance.

The life of Saint Francis was rooted in nature, but nature as God’s creation. And precisely because all of it was created originally by God as “good, very good,” he could embrace things in nature as though they were brothers and sisters, fellow creatures giving glory to God. This is not quite the image of him as the eco-warrior saint that some of our contemporaries like to depict him as. Francis was aware of our fallen nature and our tendency to want to dominate nature for our own ends rather than act as stewards of God’s creation. Instead of hugging trees, Saint Francis showed how to tame our unruly nature. From negotiating with wolves to preaching to birds, or quelling desire by throwing himself into a rose bush, Francis showed how man can dominate his own fallen nature as a prerequisite to attaining a peaceful unity with the rest of nature. G. K. Chesterton wrote that Saint Francis led the world out of a long period of “purgation,” meaning that the ancients in their pursuit of “nature worship” had tainted nature to the point where “the whole world was colored by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.” Chesterton explained that the only way to exorcise this worship of nature from the soul was through the “unearthly.” For this reason, art after the fall of the Roman Empire looked to the heavens—abstracted figures floating against a golden background—the physicality removed from their bodies and nature chased from their surroundings. Saint Francis paved the way for a reconciliation with nature in art by composing the “Canticle of the Creatures,” one of the first poems in the vernacular, worshipping the creator through his creation.

In the Upper Basilica of Assisi, the stories of Saint Francis unfold in hills, fields, and plains, painted by a team of artists led by Giotto di Bondone. Water gushes from a rock as a parched pilgrim slakes his thirst. Francis gives his mantle to a beggar in a valley tucked between two hill towns. Long before Leonardo da Vinci’s evocative landscapes and Raphael’s Madonnas nestled in verdant bowers, Saint Francis helped artists recapture nature for art.

Saint Francis was a man of action. He captured the imagination of his age with his words and actions, which so resonated with people that his biographies were composed as vignettes recounting his numerous adventures. To narrate the extraordinary series of encounters of Saint Francis in his native land, art needed to provide a stage—and so came the first stirrings of linear perspective.

Painting in the previous era was marked by flat figures silhouetted against a gold or monochrome background. Roger Bacon in Oxford urged his confrères to find artists able to convey the “literal sense” of the holy stories, so that they could imagine the scenes and feel like witnesses to the story. Creating pictorial space through perspective became an important element of rendering the reality of the sacred stories. Bacon’s call was received enthusiastically by the patrons of the Basilica of Assisi, where the Francis effect saw rooms, piazzas, and chapels created in paint to express the remarkable events of his life.

In the Upper Basilica, one panel shows Saint Francis praying at the chapel of San Damiano. Giotto depicted the saint inside a dilapidated structure missing roof tiles; a clever cutaway reveals Francis kneeling before the crucifix receiving the mandate to “rebuild my church.”

In the Lower Basilica of Assisi, Simone Martini painted Saint Martin of Tours asleep in his bed, a quilted cover outlining his body below. A patterned curtain frames his head and a chest of drawers on the floor point to the tidy life of a military man. In that carefully constructed space, Jesus and a cohort of angels appear, crowding the small space and creating a wonderful illustration of vocation. The plans people make to order their lives are often interrupted by the overwhelming presence of the Lord. The perspective technique was not employed for its own sake, but as an aid to preaching, one of the charisms of the Franciscan order.

Every element of Saint Francis’ life was bound up with his devotion to Christ’s Passion. From the moment when Jesus spoke to him from the cross to his stigmata, Francis manifested the human suffering and humiliation Christ experienced in the Passion.

Whereas Byzantine art emphasized Christ’s triumph over death, portraying a living figure alive and erect dominating the cross, the Francis effect produced a multitude of crucifixes showing the lifeless Christ, head lowered, body slumped.

In the monumental Franciscan church in Florence dedicated to the Holy Cross, Giotto’s teacher, Cimabue, produced a 14-foot-high crucifix showing the lifeless Christ, one of the earliest of its type. The elegant figure lowers his head in death, and the opaque loincloth underscores the physicality of Jesus, the man who suffered and died for us. Giotto, for his part, would perfect this image, cupping the hands around the nails, slumping the muscles of the abdomen and pinning both feet with a single nail to emphasize the unnatural discomfort of Christ’s torment.

Art Historian Anne Derbes explores this extraordinary transformation in her book Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy. She proposes that Saint Francis, who preached with words and actions, showed the world what it would look like to respond to Christ’s call to “take up your cross and follow me.” Art, drawn by the saint’s powerful persona, followed. The Francis effect was so compelling that it drew artists not just as employees, but as followers: Giotto, Dante, and Michelangelo Buonarotti were all third order Franciscans. The result was a new artistic movement that celebrated human beings, made in the image and likeness of God. These artists studied human forms, movements, and expressions to depict them with greater naturalism in believable environments. The development of pictorial space would grow into one-point linear perspective a century later, and the human experience, shared by Christ and thus made worthy of depiction, would develop into the glorious narrative cycles of the Renaissance.