Photograph: Alessandro Sarteanesi/© Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castelloīurri once had an exhibition in Assisi and his humble assemblages helped pave the way for Arte Povera, the 1960s Italian art movement that rejected plastic-fantastic modernity and instead brought natural, even living materials into the gallery. Paving the way to Arte Povera … Sacco by Alberto Burri, 1953. This matted fabric is juxtaposed with a 1953 abstract artwork Sacco, or Sack, by Alberto Burri, whose layers of worn sacking are perforated by a red circle that could be bloody stigmata. The brown sackcloth habit and hempen belt that Francis is said to have worn are here, lent by the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
At first I thought: “What desperate stuff.” And do we really need to be greeted by an Antony Gormley statue spreading its arms and gazing heavenward? Yet it’s a valid inclusion, because it replicates the stance of the enraptured saint in a painting by Bellini. It includes a Marvel comic entitled Francis Brother of the Universe among paintings by El Greco and Fra Angelico. The show celebrates the sentimentality and artistic beauty Saint Francis inspires: as if you’d wandered into a baroque church in Naples where great art hovers amid candles, incense and grisly effigies. Considering his job, he’s refreshingly free from art snobbery. Saint Francis of Assisi is co-curated by the National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi.
And his vision is as urgent as it was 800 years ago, seen in surprising finds including a medieval feminist fresco of Poor Clares, as the female Franciscan order was called, and a silvered horn given to Francis as a symbol of peace by Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.
Francis was the real thing, as innocent and poetic as his portraits, to judge by a letter he wrote to his friend Brother Leo that’s on display in the National Gallery’s enraptured exhibition about this inspiring figure. You don’t need to believe to believe in Saint Francis.
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