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To try to understand the ferment and the contribution of thirteenth-century Umbria to the history of art, we can start from a detail: the red trace that Giunta Pisano painted under the armpit of the Crucifix kept in the Porziuncola of Assisi and on display from 10 March to 9 June 2024 at the National Gallery of Umbria for the exhibition «The enigma of the Master of San Francesco. The Stil Novo of thirteenth-century Umbria”.
At the roots of Francis’ iconography
That brushstroke, almost a shadow, minute and refined, dated around 1236, marks a change in the iconography of the painted Cross. Christ with his solemn face is no longer triumphans over death but patiens, suffering, as the Byzantines had already begun to portray him. Christ is dead, all the pain of the world is concentrated in his flesh and Giunta codifies the model for the subsequent Crosses of Cimabue and Giotto. These are the stylistic choices of the artist who, in his travels between Assisi, Bologna and Rome, certainly came into contact with the mendicant orders which were expanding greatly in the mid-13th century. These were turbulent years: Francis had recently died (1226) and his uniqueness had already been grasped, Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio had had the lives of the Poverello rewritten, making him the new Christ. And, as one of the curators, Veruska Picchiarelli, writes in the catalogue, the panel from the Porziuncola Museum, Saint Francis between two angels «in combination with the stained glass windows and frescoes of the Basilica of Assisi, contributes to codifying and canonizing the official image of the alter Christus, defined within the Minorite order at a now convenient distance from the death of the saint, with the backing of the Church of Rome”. The panel (around 1255), which is also a relic, since it is believed to have been painted on the pine board on which Saint Francis was placed at the moment of his passing, is the work of the Master of Saint Francis, a key figure in the Perugian exhibition. The name of the artist is not known, but starting from this work the art historian Henry Thode in 1895 traced his work and the subsequent influences, which the three curators, Veruska Picchiarelli, Andrea De Marchi and Emanuele Zappasodi, interweaving threads, superimposing frescoes, from Assisi to Perugia, I am able to restore in its completeness.
After Giunta Pisano, before Cimabue
The gold of Francis’ nimbus in the Porziuncola panel glorifies the Poverello, presenting him, despite the stigmata, as an emperor. It is a new model of sanctity, one that will also be exalted in the frescoes of the Lower Basilica of Assisi. On 25 May 1253, Pope Innocent IV consecrated the building, which was naked and aniconic, and the Master of San Francesco made it the temple of Francis, with frescoes in the Lower Basilica and stained glass windows – the first in Italy – in the Upper Basilica . In the mid-thirteenth century, Assisi and, more generally, Umbria, were open-air construction sites, cosmopolitan crossroads of artists, of new ways that would reach as far as Cimabue and Giotto. As Andrea De Marchi writes: in 1260, in Assisi, we witnessed the «rise of a rising star in the night: the Master of San Francesco, ornamentalist and storyteller. After Giunta Pisano, before Cimabue”. But, despite this, the greatness of Cimabue and Giotto then obscured his role as a forerunner in the definition of thirteenth-century types.
The wall paintings in the nave of the Lower Basilica show five Stories of the Passion of Christ (on the right) and five Stories of Saint Francis (on the left), partly lost due to the opening of the side chapels at the end of the thirteenth century. But what remains is the triumph of colours, the triumph of axonometric vegetal geometric friezes on the spandrels, a varied and composite dictionary of imagination and technical skills. The same ones that we find in the tempera of the Dossale of the church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, the second Franciscan settlement after Assisi, rebuilt thanks to exceptional loans from the National Gallery in Washington and the Metropolitan of New York, or in the Cross dated 1272, flaming Byzantinism, of an almost wild taste and with the Saint touching one of Christ’s two feet. And to move the scene the Master paints Francesco’s foot on the frame. There is energy and pathos, and a rigor so essential that it already prefigures Cimabue.
The other Masters of the thirteenth century
In total, in the exhibition we can admire seven of the nine works attributed with certainty to the Master for a career of about twenty years and we follow a philologically rich artistic journey among authors, often anonymous, who worked on the boundary between Byzantinism and modernity, also using precious stones and metals to make the gold vibrate in the most varied shades. I am the Master of the Franciscan Crosses, the Master of Santa Chiara, in that moving panel of Santa Chiara and stories of her life, which the Basilica of Santa Chiara of Assisi has lent in a completely exceptional way, together with the painted Cross from Gualdo Tadino, the Master of the Marzolini Triptych. Who closes the exhibition with his Madonna and Child and stories of Christ and the Virgin (1280-1290): he is an Umbrian painter who, thanks to the chrysography that innervates the characters, speaks a language between East and West and from the East he certainly fascinated. On the other hand, Perugia, Assisi and Umbria in those decades were truly international thanks to the presence of Armenian monks in Perugia, Templars and Franciscans in Jerusalem. They were international and open to art as evidenced, among others, by the churches of Santa Chiara in Assisi and the Cistercian complex of Santa Giuliana in Perugia. And also the scenographic digital reconstruction of the Lower Basilica proposed by Federica Corsini, based on the reliefs by Giorgio Verdiani, Alexia Charalambous and Andrea Pasquali. The Master of St. Francis is the Song of Creatures, with a bristly magnificence and a cheerful nature. When the lights of the Basilica go out, its starry sky lights up with the flickering of the candles reflected by the mirrors at the center of each star. It is 2024, but it seems like the thirteenth century, that Umbrian century that gave such a future to subsequent art.