Host: National Gallery
Date: June 6th to June 27th
Francesco di Bernadone was born in Assisi, a small city in Umbria, in 1181 or 1182, the son of a cloth merchant. As a young man he renounced all his possessions, in emulation of the life of Christ and the apostles, as he saw it described in the Gospels.
By the time of his death, in 1226, his followers, known as the Friars Minor ('lesser brothers'), were preaching his message all over Europe, and even beyond the frontiers of Christendom. But Francis had already resigned the leadership of his order, dismayed by the increasingly worldly and materialistic turn it was taking as it became a pillar of the established Church.
So, Franciscan art has at root this paradox: some of the most magnificent churches of the later Middle Ages, with their monuments, funerary chapels, altarpieces and frescoes, were created by an order of mendicant (originally literally 'begging') friars, committed to poverty.
We will examine how this came to be in this four-week course, which focuses mainly on the central Italian heartland of Saint Francis and his order, in the critical period of artistic change leading up to the Renaissance.
