PERUGIA .- For the first time, 60 works from the world’s leading museums piece together the artistic narrative of one of the most important painters of the thirteenth century. The exhibition is being held to mark the 800th anniversary of the appearance of the stigmata on Saint Francis of Assisi. Following the major exhibition dedicated to Pietro Vannucci, known as Perugino, marking the 500th anniversary of his death, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia is now preparing to host another prestigious undertaking, from 10 March to 9 June 2024, this time with the unprecedented aim of rediscovering the figure of the Master of Saint Francis, one of the most important artists of the thirteenth century, coming after Giunta Pisano and before Cimabue, with whom he can bear direct comparison for the level both of his ideas and of his painting.

Curated da Andrea De Marchi, Emanuele Zappasodi and Veruska Picchiarelli on the occasion of the celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of the appearance of the stigmata on the body of Saint Francis of Assisi, this retrospective brings together for the first time 60 masterpieces from some of the world’s most prestigious museums, from the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

From the National Gallery of Umbria, whose collections include 60% of the works on panel by the Master of Saint Francis, the exhibition also extends to feature the cycle of Stories from the Life of Christ and Stories of Saint Francis painted by the artist in the Lower Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, one of the consequences of the agreement of valorisation concluded between the Franciscan friary of the Sacro Convento and the museum in Perugia.

The thirteenth was a century of enormous social, economic and cultural upheavals. Umbria was to prove itself the region that was best capable of absorbing the shock generated by the birth of the mendicant orders, in particular the Franciscans, and transforming it into positive energy. So it is no coincidence that it was Umbria and Assisi that became the new fulcrum in the system of European arts, the forge where some of the most singular works of the art of the age were created. Outstanding in this panorama is the figure of the Master of Saint Francis, whose name is still unknown to us today, which is why he is known conventionally after the panel with the effigy of the Saint painted on the same board on which he passed away, now preserved in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and exceptionally on show in the exhibition in Perugia.

It was to him that the friars minor turned, first to work on the stained glass in the Upper Basilica, flanking the master craftsmen from Germany and France, then to decorate the entire Lower Basilica. Creating myriad different friezes, in imitation of enamels and the fine work of goldsmiths, the Master set the first cycle of Stories of the Life of Saint Francis in the basilica’s single nave, telling them in parallel with those of the Life of Christ, as specified by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, then the General of the Order, who identified the saint as Alter Christus, and adapting Giunta’s Byzantine-inspired styling to achieve sinuous rhythms and an utterly unprecedented sweetness of empathic meanings, of more naturalistic notes and of a more explicit sentimental expression.

On the occasion of this exhibition, 3D lasers have been used to make relief scans of the mural paintings of the Lower Basilica in Assisi, so as to draw up a documentary record of the artist’s technical experiments and furnish a virtual digital reconstruction of the original layout of the cycle painted in about 1260, since it was subsequently seriously compromised when the lateral chapels were opened.

The exhibition itinerary installed in the National Gallery of Umbria will hinge around the Crucifix, dated 1272 and coming from the church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, one of the most important pieces of all the works housed in the museum, providing a focus for the majority of the painter’s works, which are now scattered in a variety of museums all over the world. A climate-controlled showcase will house the surviving section of the double-sided reredos that used rise above the high altar in the church of San Francesco al Prato, visually completing the great Crucifix, and of which the Gallery now houses the largest number of fragments.

The exhibition will also attempt to furnish an articulated and as systematic as possible documentation of all painting produced in Umbria in the period when the Master of Saint Francis was active, from the middle of the century to the inauguration of the project to adorn the Upper Basilica of Assisi under Pope Nicholas IV. The symbolic starting point will in any case be the work in Umbria of Giunta Pisano, attributing the new, later dating of approximately 1230 to the reredos with Saint Francis of Assisi and the Four Post-Mortem Miracles from the Museum of the Treasury of the Pontifical Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, one of the century’s masterpieces, and comparing it with the other version now in the Vatican Museums and with the signed Crucifix of the Porziuncola. Of no less significance is the possibility to appreciate the works probably by Gilio di Pietro from Pisa, who was active in Siena and Orte in the middle of the century.

Alongside the Master of Saint Francis, reconstructions will also be ventured of some of his contemporaries, such as the Master of the Franciscan Crucifixes and the Master of Santa Chiara, the latter case made possible by the exceptional loan of the hagiographic altarpiece from the Basilica of Saint Clare, dated 1283, and of the monumental painted crucifix from the Rocca Flea Civic Museum in Gualdo Tadino. The production of the Master of the Marzolini Triptych, which has some singular affinities with Armenian miniature painting, will provide eloquent evidence of the extraordinary polyphony of works and of artists in Umbria in the second half of the thirteenth century, grown to maturity in the shadow of the international construction project in Assisi.

The region unquestionably constitutes a privileged observatory for understanding the nature of the intense exchanges that criss-crossed the Mediterranean trading routes in that period, between the Holy Land and central Italy, the cradle of the Franciscan movement, and of the epoch-making artistic revolutions that would have been inconceivable in the absence of the climate created in the Basilica of Saint Francis.

The exhibition is the result of a partnership between the National Gallery of Umbria, the Ministry of Culture, the Pontifical Basilica and Franciscan Friary of the Sacro Convento of Saint Francis of Assisi and the “San Francesco d’Assisi” Seraphic Province of the Friars Minor of Umbria, with the support of the Perugia Foundation and in synergy with the Region of Umbria.


Curated by Andrea De Marchi, Emanuele Zappasodi and Veruska Picchiarelli