THE first sight of Assisi is unforgettable. The town seems to hang from the Monte Subasio, stretched between the massive basilica at its northern angle and the two medieval fortresses high to the south, the Rocca Maggiore and the Rocca Minore. Controlling the most fertile part of the valley of the Assino and its mountainous hinterland, Assisi has long been a place of some consequence. The portico of the Roman temple, commandeered by an undistinguished church, still dominates the central Piazza del Comune. The wonderful front of the Romanesque cathedral of San Rufino east of the piazza implies the town’s wealth in the eleventh century.
But Assisi as we know it owes its character to one man, Saint Francis. The son of a local noble, born in 1181/2, Saint Francis, after various vicissitudes, became a powerful champion of religious reform. The order that bears his name became a force throughout the western church. Canonization followed his death in 1226 by only two years. And Assisi was quickly established as a major place of pilgrimage. The saint, whose dual commitment to poverty and obedience was genuine, would doubtless have been dismayed by the scale of the monastery his successors created in his name. Built on massive foundations, the church is on two levels and was most probably designed by Fra Elia.
San Francesco, from the north-west.
The pilgrim who walks up through the piazza below it enters the Lower Church by a side door and advances to find the body of it on the left. The church consisted originally of a single nave, from which pilgrims would descend to the crypt where the saint is buried; the side walls were frescoed, about 1270, by the so-called Master of Saint Francis with scenes from the life of the saint that established the iconography of future representations. The addition of lateral chapels means that much of the cycle is lost, but before considering these the visitor should proceed to the right transept and examine Cimabue’s fresco of the Madonna and Child with Saint Francis and Angels – painted perhaps ten years later than the anonymous master’s narratives – and then climb up to the Upper Church. Consecrated in 1253, this is a monumental, if austere, Gothic structure. Frescoes on an almost unprecedented scale must have been intended from the outset. Work began in the choir and the transepts, but the murals by Cimabue and others in these have suffered severely in the past.
San Francesco.
The nave was decorated in three tiers, the upper two with scenes from the Old Testament by Roman associates of Pietro Cavallini, the least familiar of the major innovative masters of the late thirteenth century. In the lower tier, the life of Saint Francis is narrated in a series of twenty-eight compartments, the rhythm of which is partly defined by the fictive cornices and hangings below them. The traditional view that most of the cycle is by Giotto has been questioned by several Anglo-Saxon art historians but would seem to be valid. The artist was keenly aware of his role as propagandist. His narration is clear and logical, his human forms solid and plausible, his settings subordinate and insubstantial. His rendition of the Temple of Minerva in the Piazza del Comune – before which the young Francis divests himself of his clothes – well illustrates this: the columns are etiolated, their number reduced. Buildings crumble, rooms confine. But it is the saint who holds our interest. Nowhere is this more perfectly expressed than in the celebrated fresco – to the right of the main door – of Saint Francis preaching to the Birds, his avian congregation perched on the hillside. The last four scenes on the left wall with their elongated figures are different in approach. The hand is clearly Florentine, that of the so-called Master of Saint Cecilia.
The Saint Francis cycle marked an epoch in the evolution of painting in central Italy. Later, Giotto would return to Assisi. The Magdalen Chapel to the right of the Lower Church was designed, and presumably partly executed, by him; and his was the impetus behind the vault of the crossing of the Lower Church. It was, however, to Siena that the authorities at Assisi turned for further projects. The first chapel on the left, dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, was assigned to Simone Martini. Partly because Simone also apparently designed the stained glass, the chapel is infinitely satisfying in its visual unity. Simone’s refinement is extreme, and it is impossible to imagine a more elegant silhouette than that of the saint as he cuts his cloak in half to clothe the beggar. The Assisi chapel, more perhaps than any of his Sienese commissions, demonstrates why Simone became so attuned to courtly taste, whether in Angevin Naples or at papal Avignon.
Simone’s contemporary, Pietro Lorenzetti, was enlisted for the left transept, where he painted scenes from the Passion, perhaps unfairly criticized by Berenson, and the huge Crucifixion, a narrative of almost unprecedented animation. But it is for the frescoes below this that Lorenzetti is more generally remembered, the niche with vessels used to celebrate mass and – above all – the poignant Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and John, intended for close – and tearful – contemplation. As an adolescent I was not surprised to see that a survivor from an earlier age, Princess Marthe Bibesco, kept a postcard of it on her writing table.
Temple of Minerva, late 1st century BC.
Places of pilgrimage are meant to attract crowds. But if numbers become too oppressive, there are buildings nearby where one will not be disturbed. A hundred metres up the main street, on the right, is the Oratorio dei Pellegrini, where a nun still prays in the presence of frescoes by local painters of the later Quattrocento, Matteo da Gualdo, Pier Antonio Mezzastris from Foligno and, most probably, Perugino’s early associate Andrea d’Assisi. Rather further away, below the walls, is the convent of San Damiano with murals by the Peruginesque Eusebio da San Giorgio in the cloister and an atmospheric candle-stained church, which the stipulations of the Lothian family have protected from tourist exploitation.
For tourism has its price. Saint Francis would still recognize the open downland of the Subasio. The rippling horizons he knew are unimpaired. But even since I first knew it in 1966, the valley below Assisi has been horribly scarred by unsightly development. Nonetheless, much of the town has hardly changed since the late Victorian painter William Blake Richmond wrote about it.