‘IN LOCO TUTISSIMO ET FIRMISSIMO’:

THE TOMB OF ST. FRANCIS IN HISTORY,

LEGEND AND ART

Donal Cooper

Introduction

They say that the body of St. Francis is buried there in a place which
they show, but the truth is that no one knows the exact spot, not even
those in the monastery, except the Pope, one cardinal, and a brother
of the monastery, to whom the Pope confides the secret.
Thus the Spanish pilgrim Pero Tafur summarised his visit to the
tomb of St. Francis at Assisi in the spring of 1436.1 His unlikely
rationale for a missing grave introduces us at once to the singular
blend of memory, mystery and belief that has characterised the study
of Francis’s shrine over the centuries. For one thing, any treatment
of the Saint’s tomb below the high altar of the Lower Church must
confront the extraordinary fact that, prior to 1818, Francis’s body
had been lost for at least three hundred years—possibly many more.
The archaeological complexities and historical controversies that
shroud the tomb continue to deter modern scholars, and general

1
Pero Tafur —Travels and Adventures 1435–1439, trans. and ed. Malcolm Letts
(London, 1926), p. 44; the original Spanish texts reads: “Dizen que el cuerpo de
Sant Francisco está allí enterrado en un lugar que ellos muestran, pero la verdat
es que ninguno non lo sabe en qué lugar está, aunque dentro en el monasterio,
salvo el Papa é un cardenal, é un frayle del mesmo monasterio de quien el Papa
lo confía”; Andanças é viajes de Pero Tafur por diversas partes del mundo avidos 1435–1439,
ed. José María Ramos (Madrid, 1934), p. 29. This article expands a series of
research papers delivered to the Association of Art Historians’ annual conference,
the Leeds International Medieval Congress (both 2000), and the International
Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo (2001). In developing this material, I am
particularly indebted to Janet Robson, Beth Williamson, Paul Binski, Dillian Gordon
and Padre Gerhard Ruf, OFMConv., for their generous advice and valuable com-
ments. My research has been supported by the British School at Rome, the Dutch
Art Historical Institute in Florence, the Leverhulme Trust, the Henry Moore
Foundation and the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The
essay is dedicated to Joanna Cannon, whose innovative approach to mendicant
shrines inspired me to look again at St. Francis’s tomb.
2 donal cooper

studies of the Basilica rarely offer a reconstruction of the Saint’s bur-

ial, despite the fundamental function of his tomb in Assisi’s role as
one of Europe’s major pilgrimage centres. As a result, the shrine of
the most popular of all late medieval saints remains poorly under-
stood, with no consensus regarding its initial form.
The modern pilgrim to Assisi experiences the tomb of St. Francis
in a manner wholly unrelated to its medieval origins. The Saint’s
sarcophagus forms the focal point of a spacious crypt beneath the
crossing of the Lower Church that allows the faithful to circulate
freely around the tomb. A number of Francis’s first companions—
Brothers Leo, Rufino, Masseo and Angelo—are now interred around
the crypt’s perimeter, their remains translated here from the transept
of the Lower Church in the nineteenth century. The present space,
allowing for Ugo Tarchi’s alterations between 1925 and 1932, dates
from the 1820s and was inspired by the excavations that finally led
to the rediscovery of the body of St. Francis on 12 December, 1818.
The records made during that last archaeological campaign now rep-
resent one of the key sources for the reconstruction of the medieval
tomb, for the entire area beneath the crossing of the Lower Church
was subsequently cleared to construct the new crypt.
Francis’s tomb has attracted interest from scholars within the Order,
and debate is presently dominated by Fra Isidoro Gatti’s exhaustive
but unwieldy La Tomba di San Francesco nei secoli (Assisi, 1983).2 The
issue of access to the tomb in the medieval period has proved par-
ticularly fraught, with Gatti proposing that the hermetic arrange-
ment unearthed in 1818 was in place as early as the mid thirteenth
century. Fathers Marinangeli and Zaccaria elaborated an alternative
position in serialised contributions to the local periodical S. Francesco
Patrono d’Italia, suggesting instead that the tomb was only sealed in
the fifteenth century (these articles are, unfortunately, rarely cited in
the general literature).3 The correct answer to this basic question is

2
Isidoro Gatti, OFMConv., La Tomba di S. Francesco nei secoli (Assisi, 1983). The
important study by Gerhard Ruf, OFMConv., Das Grab des heiligen Franziskus. Die
Fresken der Unterkirche von Assisi (Freiburg, 1981) sets the tomb within the wider con-
text of the Lower Church.
3
Bonaventura Marinangeli, OFMConv., published 17 articles under the title “La
tomba di S. Francesco attraverso i secoli” in the monthly periodical S. Francesco
d’Assisi (published by the Sacro Convento, hereafter SFA) between 4 July, 1921 and
4 February, 1924. A further essay in SFA 8 (1928), pp. 405–410, provides a brief syn-
thesis of his earlier contributions. From 1969 to 1974 Giuseppe Zaccaria, OFMConv.,
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 3

given extra weight by the Order’s consistent assertion that the Assisi
tomb contained Francis’s complete and undivided body.4 In 1279
the Podestà and Consiglio of Assisi, responding to false reports of
relics from Austria, affirmed that Francis’s whole body was guarded
by the friars “in the safest and most secure place” (“in loco tutissimo
et firmissimo”).5 The Basilica held no other corporeal relics of the
Saint, save for some of Francis’s hair and vials of blood collected
from the Stigmata.6 Furthermore, Francis’s body was distinct from
every other holy cadaver in bearing the Holy Stigmata, the mirac-
ulously imprinted wounds of Christ. These had not been proclaimed

revised and expanded Marinangeli’s arguments in a series of 19 articles, again under

the general heading “La tomba di S. Francesco attraverso i secoli”, in the same
journal, now renamed S. Francesco Patrono d’Italia (hereafter SFPI). For our purposes,
the most important articles in the Marinangeli-Zaccaria series are “Le diverse
opinioni degli scrittori antichi e recenti sulla tomba del Santo. Il nostro pensiero”,
SFPI 49 (1969), pp. 270–278; “La primitiva sepoltura di S. Francesco in S. Giorgio
dove rimase per quattro anni”, SFPI 50 (1970), pp. 46–54; “La traslazione del
corpo di S. Francesco nella nuova chiesa costruita in suo onore”, SFPI 50 (1970),
pp. 166–174; “Il preteso trafugamento e nascondimento del corpo di S. Francesco”,
SFPI 50 (1970), pp. 218–226; “Il loculo sotto l’altare maggiore nel quale Frate Elia
collocò il corpo di S. Francesco”, SFPI 51 (1971), pp. 98–105; “La tomba del Santo
secondo il sigillo detto di Frate Elia ed una miniatura del secolo XIII”, SFPI 51
(1971), pp. 218–226; “L’antico accesso alla tomba di S. Francesco e quando esso
venne definitivamente chiuso”, SFPI 51 (1971), pp. 442–450; “L’altare del Santo
nella chiesa inferiore e il corpo primitivo con l’antica iconostasi”, SFPI 52 (1972),
pp. 98–106; “Quando e da chi fu modificata la tomba all’esterno e all’interno”,
SFPI 52 (1972), pp. 218–226; “Visite vere e visite fantastiche alla tomba di S.
Francesco”, SFPI 53 (1973), pp. 38–46; “La commissione pontificia descrive in quale
stato si trovava il corpo di S. Francesco nell’anno 1818”, SFPI 54 (1974), pp. 38–45;
“La commissione pontificia conclude la ricognizione del corpo di S. Francesco. La
visita dell’Imperatore Francesco I”, SFPI 54 (1974), pp. 198–205.
4
A rather later tradition, which can be dated from Bartolomeo da Pisa’s De
Conformitate of 1385–90, claimed that Francis’s heart had been removed at his death
and buried at the Porziuncola, see Gatti, La tomba, pp. 163–186.
5
Livarius Oliger, OFM., “Testimonium Municipii Assisiensis de adhuc integro
corpore S. Francisci anno 1279”, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum (hereafter AFH)
11 (1918), pp. 557–559; Gatti, La tomba, pp. 99, 112, 168: on 6 June, 1279 the
municipal authorities declared “quod de corpore Sancti nostri, videlicet beati Francisci,
nichil est diminutum vel ablatum [certain friars in Austria had claimed to possess
a relic of one of Francis’s fingers], sed totum salvum et integrum corpus in loco
tutissimo et firmissimo Assisii apud Fratres Minores in Christo nobis Karissimos in
ecclesia ad honorem eius constructa et dedicata sub diligenti custodia et debita reve-
rencia conservatur”.
6
The 1338 sacristy inventory recorded “unum ciborium cristallinum, cum pede
argenteo; in quo est de sanguine beati Francisci” and another similar “in quo est
de sanguine beati Francisci et de capillis et de tunica”; see Francesco Pennacchi
and Lato Alessandri, “I più antichi inventari della Sacristia del Sacro Convento di
Assisi (1338–1473)”, AFH 7 (1914), p. 78.
4 donal cooper

or widely witnessed during Francis’s lifetime, making his body a crit-

ical document in the Order’s efforts to gain widespread acceptance
for the Stigmatisation as historical fact.7
The first part of this essay reviews the evidence—literary, archae-
ological and representational—for the reconstruction of the medieval
tomb, and offers a new synthesis of the available material. The sec-
ond begins the task of integrating the material fabric of the tomb
into a broader treatment of pilgrimage at Assisi, focusing on the
years around 1300. Thanks to the work of André Vauchez and his
school, we now have a much better understanding of the devotional
practices fostered by the cult of saints in late medieval Italy, while
recent scholarship on pilgrimage has emphasised the need to establish
shrines within their architectural contexts.8 By setting Francis’s tomb
within the wider environment of the Lower Church, I will address
the uneasy relationship between the Saint’s shrine and the spatial
arrangement of the transept area, a tension fed by the conflicting
demands of friars and pilgrims.

(i) The Reconstruction of the Tomb

The Historical Record

Francis Bernardone died on the night of the 3/4 October, 1226 at
the Porziuncola, the simple church dedicated to S. Maria degli Angeli
that he had rebuilt on the plain below Assisi. At his death the early

7
Elias of Cortona proclaimed the Stigmata in an encyclical letter to the Order
sent several days after Francis’s death, which stated that “non diu ante mortem
frater et pater noster apparuit crucifixus, quinque plagas, quae vere sunt stigmata
Christi, portans in corpore suo”. Elias likened the Stigmata on Francis’s hands and
feet to wounds received from nails that had passed through his flesh, leaving pro-
truding black scars. His side appeared punctured by a lance, and blood flooded
freely from this open wound. For Elias’s Epistola and the subsequent promotion and
acceptance of the Stigmata see Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate:
Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Turin, 1993), esp. pp. 52–62.
8
André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge: d’après les
procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome, 1981). For a recent case
study of a mendicant shrine in its artistic context see Joanna Cannon and André
Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti—Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy
Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1999), esp. pp. 21–78.
For the importance of the wider architectural context see J. Crook, The Architectural
Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, ca. 300–1200 (Oxford, 2000).
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 5

biographies describe his soul ascending to heaven on a white cloud,

envisioned by the dying Fra Agostino, Provincial Minister of the
Terra del Lavoro.9 While Francis’s spirit departed in celestial glory,
there was every expectation that his body would acquire the sta-
tus of a miracle-working holy relic. This assumption underlay the
careful precautions of the friars and civic authorities in guiding the
ailing Francis back to Assisi; it now necessitated the removal of his
body from S. Maria degli Angeli. Francis had intended to die at the
Porziuncola, but this small chapel was too strategically exposed to
offer a viable location for his shrine. The next day, Francis’s remains
were removed to the suburban convent of S. Damiano, where they
were venerated by St. Clare. From there the holy cadaver was swiftly
translated within the city walls to the parish church of S. Giorgio.
The need to protect Francis’s body from profanation or theft was
keenly felt from the outset, and it was to colour the eventual design
of his shrine in the Lower Church. Perugia—Assisi’s neighbour and
traditional political rival—presented the principal threat, and Brother
Elias had carefully avoided that city’s territory when accompanying
Francis on his final journey from Cortona to Assisi in 1226.10 The
fear of furta sacra must have revived after 1320 when Perugian forces
sacked the Assisian settlement of Isola Romanesca (modern-day Bastia,
less than two miles from S. Maria degli Angeli) and removed the
relics of the Franciscan Blessed Conrad of Offida to the Perugian
church of S. Francesco al Prato.11
Within S. Giorgio Francis’s remains were placed within a sub-
stantial but simple wooden coffin—this is the arrangement that is
depicted with remarkable consistency in a number of post mortem mir-
acle scenes on the early Vita panels (Fig. 1).12 The hopes of the friars

9
For Bonaventure’s version see Francis of Assisi: Early Documents 2, eds. Regis
J. Armstrong OFMCap., J.A. Wayne Hellmann OFMConv., William J. Short OFM.
(New York, 2000), p. 644 (hereafter cited as Early Documents). For a synthesis of the
various accounts of Francis’s final days see Michael Robson, OFM., St. Francis of
Assisi: The Legend and the Life (London, 1997), pp. 254–262.
10
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Le diverse opinioni”, pp. 273–4.
11
For Conrad of Offida’s relics see Donal Cooper, “Qui Perusii in archa saxea tumu-
latus: The Shrine of Beato Egidio in S. Francesco al Prato, Perugia”, Papers of the
British School at Rome 69 (2001), p. 235, note 59.
12
For the S. Giorgio arrangement see Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “La primitiva
sepoltura”, pp. 46–54. After 1230, the wooden arca seems to have been disman-
tled, and in 1717 the Eremo delle Carceri still possessed a relic “del legno della
cassa, ove prima di esser trasferito riposava il suo [Francis’s] corpo” (p. 54, note 5).
6 donal cooper

and the townspeople were not disappointed, for on 16 July, 1228

Francis was canonised in a lengthy ceremony led by Pope Gregory
IX in S. Giorgio. The modest parish church was in many ways a
fitting resting-place for the new Saint: Francis had studied there as
a young man and had preached his first sermons in the church.13
It seems clear, however, that the S. Giorgio tomb was always intended
as a provisional arrangement while a more ambitious sepulchre was
prepared, suitable for receiving the pilgrims flocking to Francis’s
shrine. Plans for this new building were already well advanced by
the time of the canonisation. On 29 March, 1228 a certain Simone
Puzzarelli had given the friars a plot of land on the Collis Inferni, the
barren promontory to the west of the town that overlooked the Tiber
valley towards Perugia.14 In April Gregory’s bull Recolentes qualiter pro-
claimed the building of a great church and enjoined the faithful to
offer alms to aid its completion.15 Through the redeeming presence
of St. Francis, the site was now to be known as the Collis Paradisi. On
14 July, 1228, two days before the canonisation ceremony, the Pope
laid the foundation stone for the new double basilica of S. Francesco.
Within two years, sufficient progress had been made on the Lower
Church to allow the translation of the Saint’s remains to their new
tomb. This occurred on 25 May, 1230—the eve of Pentecost—with
thousands of friars gathered in Assisi for the opening of the General
Chapter of the Order the next day.
What exactly happened in Assisi that day will probably never be
known, but the 1230 translation marks the beginning of the secrecy
and rancour that clouds our understanding of Francis’s tomb. The
translation was evidently a troubled affair, this much is clear from

According to local sources, another section was later painted with Francis’s image.
This is often identified with the thirteenth-century panel of the Saint, sometimes
attributed to Cimabue, preserved at S. Maria dei Angeli; see L. Carattoli, “Di una
tavola della primitiva cassa mortuaria di S. Francesco”, Miscellanea francescana 1
(1886), pp. 45–46. Another early image of St. Francis at the Porziuncola by the
Maestro di S. Francesco was said to be painted on the board on which Francis
died, for this tradition see Elvio Lunghi, Il Crocefisso di Giunta Pisano e l’Icona del
‘Maestro di S. Francesco’ alla Porziuncola (S. Maria degli Angeli, 1995), pp. 65–91.
13
With reference to Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior, see Early Documents 2, p. 647.
14
Gatti, La tomba, p. 76.
15
The bull specified a church “in qua eius corpus debeat conservari”, see Bullarium
Franciscanum Romanorum Pontificum constitutiones, epistolas, ac diplomata continens tribus ordinibus
Minorum, Clarissarum, et Poenitentium (hereafter Bullarium Franciscanum), ed. Johannes H.
Sbaralea (Rome, 1759), vol. 1, pp. 40–41; Gatti, La tomba, pp. 76–77.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 7

our best contemporary source, the papal bull Speravimus hactenus sent
by Gregory IX twenty-two days later to the bishops of Perugia and
Spoleto (the See of Assisi lying vacant at the time).16 The Pope
berated the civic authorities of Assisi for disrupting the translation
without papal authorisation and threatened to revoke the generous
privileges granted to the Basilica by his earlier edict Is qui Ecclesiam.
On pain of excommunication he ordered the Podestà and Consiglio
of Assisi to send representatives to Rome to explain their behaviour.
Gregory’s tone was uncompromising: “Sciant quam graviter Nos,
imo Dominum offenderunt”.
The Pope’s anger was evidently placated, for the Basilica kept its
privileges and the Podestà and others escaped excommunication, but
the translation remained a matter of controversy within the Franciscan
Order. The principal strand of Franciscan hagiography treated the
event as unremarkable. Julian of Speyer, who was probably present
in Assisi that day, stated simply: “The most holy body was trans-
lated to the church constructed near the walls of the city with such
great solemnity that it cannot be briefly described”.17 Bonaventure
gave a similarly straightforward description, adding that “while that
sacred treasure was being carried, marked with the seal of the Most
High King, He whose likeness he bore deigned to perform many
miracles”.18 But another tradition questioned the orthodox account.
The first sign of discontent surfaces in the late 1250s with Thomas
of Eccleston’s claim that “the body of St. Francis had been trans-
lated three days before the friars gathered [for the General Chapter]”.19
The author of the Speculum vitae beati Francisci (ca. 1325) was more
succinct: “Elias, led by his concern for the remains, had the trans-
lation done before the friars gathered”.20 This charge received its

16
Bullarium Franciscanum, vol. 1, pp. 66–67; Gatti, La tomba, p. 87.
17
Analecta Franciscana (hereafter AF) 10 (1941), p. 371; “Translatum est igitur cor-
pus sanctissimum ad eamdem costructam foris prope muros civitatis ecclesiam . . . cum
tanto videlicet apparatu solemni, qui brevi sermone describi non posset”; cited by
Gatti, La tomba, p. 94. English translation in Early Documents 1, p. 420; Julian’s text
is generally dated between 1232–35.
18
Early Documents 2, p. 648.
19
Fratris Thomae vulgo dicti de Eccleston: De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, ed.
A.G. Little (Manchester, 1951), p. 65; “credidit [Elias] autem populus, quod esset
discordia, quia corpus sancti Francisci tertia die, antequam patres convenissent,
translatum erat”.
20
Gatti, La tomba, p. 96; “Fecit igitur fieri translationem illam Helias antequam
fratres convenirent, humano timore ductus”.
8 donal cooper

fullest treatment in the Chronica XXIV Generalium, compiled between

1365 and 1373: “Brother Elias . . . led by his concern for the remains,
had the translation conducted secretly, desiring that none but a few
would know where the holy body was buried in the church”.21
Did Elias deliberately conceal Francis’s body within a hidden tomb?
Even Eccleston’s account, the first to directly level the accusation,
postdates the translation by several decades and bears the bitter taste
of the general blackening of Elias’s name that characterised so much
Franciscan polemic from the mid-thirteenth century on. Although
not Minister General at the time, Elias seems to have maintained
effective control of the Basilica complex in Assisi and would undoubt-
edly have been involved in the burial of St. Francis in the Lower
Church. Nevertheless, it is difficult to discern any motive for mali-
cious activity on his part—indeed, Eccleston and the author of the
Chronica XXIV Generalium do not provide one, beyond a vague dis-
like of Giovanni Parenti. The allegations are only comprehensible in
the context of the wider pattern of malign behaviour ascribed to
Elias by later texts.22 It is perhaps instructive that another thirteenth-
century source, Fra Salimbene da Parma, who missed no opportu-
nity to censure the sometime Minister General, did not mention Elias
in connection with the translation, which he entered in his chronicle
without further comment.23
The case for malpractice on Elias’s part should probably be dis-
counted, for it is hardly credible that a burial place could have been
prepared in the church without the cognisance of other friars. A
more likely scenario is that the funerary procession became increas-

21
AF 3 (1897), p. 212; “Frater Helias . . . ductus humano timore, occulte fecit
fieri translationem, nolens quod scirent aliqui ubi esset in ecclesia sacrum corpus,
paucis exceptis”, cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 96.
22
Michael Robson has observed that the genuine disagreements at the subse-
quent general chapter probably came to colour perceptions of Elias’s involvement
in the translation over time, see St. Francis of Assisi, p. 268. A very different expla-
nation for the 1230 controversy is provided by Richard Trexler’s provocative arti-
cle “The Stigmatised Body of St. Francis of Assisi Conceived, Processed, Disappeared”
in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, korperliche Ausdrucksformen,
eds. Klaus Schreiner and Marc Müntz (Munich, 2002), pp. 463–497, where the
translation is reassessed within a sceptical analysis that doubts the presence or vis-
ibility of the Stigmata on the Saint’s body, at least by 1230.
23
Cronica fratris Salimbene de Adam, ed. G. Scalia (Bari, 1966), vol. 1, p. 96; “Anno
Dominice incarnationis MCCXXX generale capitulum fratrum Minorum Assisii est
celebratum. In quo corporis beati Francisci, VIII Kal. Iunii translatio facta fuit”
(composed 1282–88); cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 94.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 9

ingly chaotic as it approached the Basilica, with the friars and towns-
people threatening to swamp the cortège and damage the Saint’s
remains. At this point, with the aid of civic officials and soldiers, the
procession was brought to a hurried conclusion and the burial con-
ducted privately within the Basilica while the crowd was locked out-
side. Public hysteria was a genuine danger during the translation or
burial of relics—the most extreme disturbances surrounded the funer-
ary rites of St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Marburg on 17 November,
1231, when the faithful tore at the clothes, hair, ears and nails of
the cadaver.24
Irrespective of these specific accusations, the theme of the secret
tomb became firmly embedded within the Order’s collective memory.
In his mammoth De Conformitate vitae Beati Francisci ad vitam Domini
Iesu (1385–90), Bartolomeo da Pisa inevitably linked Francis’s tomb
with Christ’s: “As Christ’s tomb was sealed and watched by guards,
so St. Francis’s tomb has been sealed, to prevent his body ever being
visible to anyone”.25 Elsewhere in his text, Bartolomeo claimed that
“nothing of [Francis’s] body is shown or kept to be shown to the
people; for he lies in that church in a place which is known to no
one but a few” (echoing the “paucis exceptis” of the Chronica XXIV
Generalium).26 The same refrain found its way into the pilgrimage lit-
erature, as evidenced by Pero Tafur’s bemused account from 1436,
cited at the beginning of this article. Tafur’s comment “that no one
knows the exact spot, not even those in the monastery”, must reflect
the sort of explanation that the friars were giving to common pil-
grims by the early fifteenth century.
On 28 November, 1442 Perugian forces led by the condottiere
Nicolò Piccinino stormed Assisi, and within days the Priors of Perugia
had petitioned Pope Eugenius IV to authorise the removal of Francis’s
body from the Basilica. Eugenius’s reply, enunciated in the letter
Accepimus licteras of 21 December, 1442, strongly rejected the Perugian

24
Gatti, 1983, p. 86. For the comparison with the equally disordered translation
of St. Anthony of Padua’s body after his death in 1231, see Robson, St. Francis of
Assisi, pp. 252–254.
25
AF 5 (1912), p. 443; “Sicut sepulchrum Christi fuit clausum et signatum cum
custodibus, sic beati Francisci sepulchrum fuit clausum, ut numquam deinceps alicui
patuerit eius corpus”; cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 112.
26
AF 4 (1906), p. 178; “De cuius corpore ad ostendendum populis nihil inven-
itur nec habetur; ac in quo ecclesiae loco iaceat, etsi quibusdam sit agnitum, quibus
vero, nulli est notum”; cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 118.
10 donal cooper

claims, noting that the removal of Francis’s relics would spell the
desolation and ruin of the Basilica. Instead the Pope admonished
the governor of Perugia, the Franciscan Provincial Minister and
Piccinino to “undertake, and execute such provisions, so that no
harm can befall these relics”.27 Eugenius’s letter stands at the begin-
ning of a long tradition, upheld by Marinangeli and Zaccaria but
rejected by Gatti, that dates the definitive closure of Francis’s tomb
to the papal rearrangements of the fifteenth century. At this point,
the nature of our sources begins to change, as the Franciscan liter-
ature assumes a mystical and prophetic tone, focusing on nocturnal
visits to secret chambers below the Lower Church and the final seal-
ing of the Saint’s tomb by the Franciscan Pontiff Sixtus IV.
In his Franceschina of ca. 1476, Fra Giacomo degli Oddi gave a
colourful account of the clandestine veneration of Francis’s remains
and the Holy Stigmata by Sixtus IV and two companions.28 Degli
Oddi went on to describe Sixtus’s desire to publicly display Francis’s
body, which was said to be miraculously uncorrupted. He was dis-
suaded from this by S. Giacomo della Marca, who cautioned that
Francis’s body must be preserved for future ages, more in need of
faith than their own.29 Heeding the advice of the fiery Observant
preacher, the Pope then ordered the final sealing of the Saint’s tomb.
For all of this information, Giacomo degli Oddi gave his source as
certain friars “worthy of trust” from the Sacro Convento. The story
was enthusiastically taken up by other Franciscan writers: Mariano
da Firenze (†1523) further embellished Giacomo’s account in his
Compendium Chronicarum, fixing Sixtus’s descent to the tomb to 1476,
while Luke Wadding later repeated substantially the same story in
his Annales Minorum of 1625.30 In 1676, two centuries after the Pope’s

27
Gatti, La tomba, pp. 114–115, 196; “. . . ut cura de ea re suscipiant, et talem
provisionem . . . faciant, quod dictis reliquiis nullum damnum inferri possit”.
28
Nicola Cavanna, OFM., La Franceschina. Testo volgare umbro del sec. XV scritto dal
P. Giacomo Oddi di Perugia, edito la prima volta nella sua integrità (S. Maria degli Angeli,
1931), vol. 2, pp. 195–196.
29
According to the Franceschina, Giacomo della Marca—then residing at the Eremo
delle Carceri—argued, “Beatissimo Patre, ad me non me pare per niente, perchè
tutto el mondo verria ad vedere lo novello Christo stigmatizzato, et seria pericoloso
che molta gente perisse de la fame per la moltitudine grande che veria in Italia;
et quando Dio vorà, se mostrarà ad un altro tempo che serà maiore de bisogno de
la fede”; Cavanna, La Franceschina, vol. 2, p. 196; Gatti, La tomba, p. 115, note 220.
30
Mariano da Firenze, OFMObs., “Compendium chronicarum fratrum mino-
rum”, in AFH 4 (1911), p. 323; “Anno quo supra [1476] Sixtus cum tota curia
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 11

visit to Assisi, the friars of the Sacro Convento affirmed in chapter

that “from the time of Sixtus IV, Supreme Pontiff from our Order,
no man has accessed the subterranean church in which rests the
body of the Saint: for access to it is obstructed by a solid and ancient
wall at the entrance to the place which may not be opened with-
out public notice”.31
In the sixteenth century, widespread belief in a lost tomb below
the Lower Church crystalised around the concept of a third, hidden
church. Giorgio Vasari, in the 1550 edition of his famous Lives, dis-
cussed the Basilica of S. Francesco in terms of a tripartite structure:
“Maestro Iacopo Tedesco [to whom Vasari attributed the plan of
the Basilica] . . . designed a beautiful church and convent, built accord-
ing to the model of three orders: one to act as a crypt, the others
as two churches”.32 Vasari continued: “in front of the cappella mag-
giore of the Lower Church is the altar, and beneath this, when it
was finished, they entombed with a most solemn translation the body
of St. Francis. And the tomb that contains the body of the glorious
Saint is in the lowest church where no one ever goes and which has
its entrance walled up . . .”33 More influential than Vasari for the
Franciscan tradition was Marcus of Lisbon’s very full treatment of
Nicholas’s V’s fantastical 1449 visit to the “third church” in his

tempore indulgentie, venit Assisium ad visitandum et ad videndum corpus beati

Francisci”; Wadding gave Mariano as his source, both cited by Gatti, La tomba, pp.
123–124. Sixtus’s visit Assisi in 1476 to honour the relics of St. Francis is confirmed
by a letter written by the Ferrarese ambassador to the Holy See, but this docu-
ment only mentions the Saint’s habits and shoes, see Gatti, p. 131, who disbelieved
Degli Oddi’s account of the visit to the tomb (pp. 122–123).
31
Cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 124: “. . . ad subterraneam Ecclesiam, in qua
Sanctum illud quiescit Corpus, a tempore Sixti IV ex nostro Ordine Summi Pontificis
neminem unquam hominum deinceps accessisse: aditus enim ad illam solido ac anti-
quato obstructus muro ex patenti loco aperiri nequit absque publica notitia”. See
also Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Quando e da chi fu modificato”, p. 220.
32
Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori: nelle redazioni del
1550 e 1568, eds. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, vol. 2 (Florence, 1967),
p. 51; “disegnò un corpo di chiesa e convento bellissimo, facendo nel modello tre
ordini: uno da farsi sottoterra e gli altri per due chiese”. Vasari’s sources for Assisi
are discussed by Pietro Scarpellini, “La decorazione pittorica della Chiesa Superiore
nelle fonti fiorentine e nella tradizione assisiana fino agli inizi del diciassettesimo
secolo”, in Il cantiere pittorico della Basilica Superiore di S. Francesco in Assisi, eds. Giuseppe
Basile and Pasquale Magro (Assisi, 2001), pp. 311–328.
33
Vasari, Le vite, p. 51; “alla capella maggiore della chiesa di sotto, l’altare, e
sotto quello, quando fu finito, collocarono con solennissima traslazione il corpo di
S. Francesco. E perché la propria sepoltura che serba il corpo del glorioso Santo
è nella prima, cioè nella più bassa chiesa dove non va mai nessuno e che ha le
porte murate . . .”
12 donal cooper

Chronicas of 1557.34 The author described a richly decorated subter-

ranean chamber, where St. Francis’s uncorrupted body stood bolt
upright, facing the east with light shining from the Stigmata. Marcos’s
Portuguese text was quickly translated into Spanish and Italian, and
coloured much subsequent Franciscan commentary on the tomb.35
In the early years of the seventeenth century, a pilgrim’s pamphlet
printed at Assisi graphically captured these beliefs in a series of
engravings, while a groundplan and view of the “third church” were
included in the first comprehensive history of the Basilica, Francesco
Maria Angeli’s Collis Paradisi, published posthumously in 1704.36
However rich, the literary traditions concerning the tomb are com-
plex and confused, with any historical basis perceived through the
distorting prisms of time and myth. As we have seen, there is no
pristine, uncontested description of the shrine on which to build, for
the burial attracted controversy from the very beginning. The sub-
terranean visions of St. Francis miraculously on his feet fall outside
the expertise of the art historian, but the question of an accessible
third church in the medieval period must be resolved before we pro-
ceed. Fortunately we can turn to a body of archaeological data to
offset the more fabulous Franciscan legends.

The Archaeological Evidence—An Open Tomb?

The growing speculation over the nature and location of Francis’s
tomb formed the backdrop to a series of carefully organised exca-
vations to recover his remains.37 Two campaigns in 1755 and 1802–3
failed before a third, led by the Papal Commissioner for Antiquities
Carlo Fea in 1818, finally succeeded.38 Luckily for the modern scholar,

34
The first volume of Marcus’s chronicle, which contains his account of the
tomb, was published in Portuguese in 1557, see Gatti, La tomba, pp. 199–201.
35
Gatti, La tomba, p. 201, counted five editions of the Italian translation of
Marcus’s first volume printed in Venice between 1582 and 1597.
36
Francesco Maria Angeli, OFMConv., Collis Paradisi amœnitas, seu Sacri Conventus
Assisiensis historiæ libri II (Montefalco, 1704), Liber primus, inserted between pp. 8–9;
entitled “Ecclesia in qua stat S.P. Francisci corpus interior prospectus; plancta eius-
dem”, signed by the local artist Francesco Providoni. The various legends regard-
ing the third church are discussed on pp. 9–19.
37
A faction in the Observant branch of the Order had begun to dispute the
very existence of the tomb, culminating in Flaminio Annibali’s polemic Quanto incerto
sia che il corpo del Serafico S. Francesco esista in Assisi nella Basilica del suo nome (Lausanne,
1779), see Gatti, La tomba, pp. 175–177.
38
An earlier excavation, sponsored by Pope Pius V, seems to have been attempted
in 1571–72, see Gatti, La tomba, p. 230.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 13

Fea scrupulously recorded what he found through extensive written

reports and invaluable cross-sections of the area beneath the high
altar (Figs. 3, 4).39
Francis’s remains were discovered inside a simple stone sarcoph-
agus, probably of Early Christian origin, which was, in turn, enclosed
within a wrought iron cage or arca.40 A number of coins and a ring
were found amongst the fragments of his bones, indicating that at
one point supplicants had been able to cast offerings into the open
coffin.41 The burial loculus had been hewn out of the mountainside
and measured approximately 380cm2 in floor area (Fig. 3).42 The
greater part of this space, however, had been filled in so that the
actual cavity containing the sarcophagus was much smaller, mea-
suring only 236cm × 113cm.43 The surrounding area was filled with
a mixture of poorly worked rubble and cut stone, the latter being
used to construct the walls that enclosed the sarcophagus. A great
deal of discussion has focused on three massive slabs of travertine

39
Summarized in Carlo Fea, Descrizione ragionata della sagrosanta patriarcal Basilica e
cappella papale di S. Francesco d’Assisi, nella quale recentemente si è ritrovato il sepolcro e il
corpo di si gran santo, e delle pitture e sculture di cui va ornato il medesimo tempio (Rome,
1820). More material was gathered by Niccola Papini, OFMConv., Notizie sicure della
morte, sepoltura, canonizzazione e traslazione di S. Francesco d’Assisi e del ritrovamento del di
lui corpo (first edition: Florence, 1822; second edition, Corretta ed accresciuta dall’autore:
Foligno, 1824). Several engravings were made of the excavations, those reproduced
here are the most detailed, being drawn by Giovambattista Mariani and engraved
by Giovambattista Cipriani in 1818. Both were eyewitnesses to the discovery of
Francis’s tomb.
40
Gatti, La tomba, pp. 35–43; the sarcophagus is probably the pre-1230 tomb
“de lapide” described in S. Giorgio (presumably within the larger wooden shrine)
by Henri d’Avranches in his Versified Life of St. Francis (1232–39) see Early Documents
1, p. 518. No early source mentions the iron cage, but Gatti supposed that Elias
commissioned it soon after Francis’s death. A similar wrought iron arca guarded
Margherita of Cortona’s cadaver in the early fourteenth century, see Cannon and
Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona, pp. 61–62. Another iron cage, apparently made for
the tomb of St. Luke in 1177, survives in S. Giustina, Padua, see Girolamo Zampieri,
La tomba di “S. Luca Evangelista” (Rome, 2003), pp. 212–214.
41
For the objects recovered from the tomb, see Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “La com-
missione pontificia descrive in quale stato si trovava il corpo”, pp. 38–45, and ibid.,
“La commissione pontificia conclude la ricognizione”, p. 199. The numismatic evi-
dence, unfortunately, does not clarify the closure of the tomb, for the coins were
minted at Lucca between 1181 and 1208, so the offerings may well predate the
1230 burial. The ring bore a depiction of Minerva and is now lost (illustrated by
Fea, p. v).
42
The measurements are Michele Millozzi’s, Gatti gave slightly smaller dimen-
sions (350 × 360cm), see La tomba, p. 96.
43
Ibid., p. 100.
14 donal cooper

limestone that were found above the coffin, which are clearly illus-
trated in the cross-section of the excavated tomb (numbers 2, 3 and
4 in Fig. 4). The two upper monoliths (numbers 3 and 4) were
intended as protective layers: they were set into the walls of the cav-
ity, were strengthened by a bond of cement sandwiched between
them, and rested on three iron bars, so that their weight in no way
bore down on the sarcophagus below.44 This singular arrangement
was immovable, and served to shield Francis’s remains from the
immense load of stone and mortar above, not to mention the mass
of the altar platform.45 Below this impenetrable stratum, the third,
smaller slab (number 2) was placed over the sarcophagus, free from
the surrounding walls.46 It served as a lid, but did not rest directly
on the stone coffin, which was encased within its wrought iron cage.
Lid and sarcophagus were separated by a dense grille of metal.
This evidence has been interpreted in very different ways. Isidoro
Gatti believed that the excavation had uncovered the tomb as it had
been sealed in the early thirteenth century, or certainly by the time
the high altar of the Lower Church was consecrated in 1253.47
Contrary to this position, Marinangeli, Zaccaria and—in response
to Gatti’s monograph—Michele Millozzi have all argued that the
1818 cross-section records a later closure of the tomb effected after
1442, under the auspices of either Eugenius IV or Sixtus IV.48 The
confined arrangement found in 1818, they observe, cannot explain
the original excavation of a much larger chamber, nearly four metres
square in plan and over three and a half metres deep, hewn from
the solid bedrock of the Collis Paradisi.49 The manner in which much

44
Ibid., pp. 103–104.
45
However, Gatti, La tomba, pp. 104–6, suggested that the twin travertine slabs
initially served as a pavement for a small confessio space above, which was accessi-
ble from 1230 until the construction of the high altar (before 1253).
46
Ibid., pp. 102–103; this slab survives and today forms the dossal above the
altar in the crypt. It measures 234 × 97cm, but a section was chiselled away dur-
ing the 1818 invention.
47
For Gatti’s own conclusions, see La tomba, p. 160. The only element that Gatti
would attribute to the Quattrocento was the introduction of the aggregate filling
above the twin travertine slabs, which he associated with Eugenius IV’s 1442 injunc-
tion to secure the tomb (although how this work could have been completed with-
out the removal of the high altar above remains unclear).
48
Michele Millozzi, OFMConv., “L’altare maggiore della Basilica inferiore”, SFPI
66 (1986), pp. 1–13. For the high altar of the Lower Church see also Julian Gardner,
“Some Franciscan Altars of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries”, in The
Vanishing Past: Studies in Medieval Art, Liturgy and Metrology Presented to Christopher Hohler,
eds. Alan Borg and Andrew Martindale (Oxford, 1981), pp. 29–38.
49
Millozzi, “L’altare maggiore”, p. 8, estimated that, according to Gatti’s argu-
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 15

of this chamber was filled with stone and aggregate raises further
questions. The narrow space that contained Francis’s sarcophagus
was faced with blocks of variable quality. Some pieces of finely
dressed stone were recovered, while others were crudely worked and
haphazardly arranged—hardly worthy of a carefully prepared bur-
ial.50 Marinangeli, Zaccaria and Millozzi explain these anomalies by
dating the coarse stonework of the burial cavity and the two bonded
slabs of travertine (together with the crude in-fill above) to the
Quattrocento.51 According to this reconstruction, the surrounding
area cut from the bedrock and filled with rubble and stone marks
the extent of a more expansive, thirteenth-century chamber beneath
the Lower Church, probably topped by a vault to support the high
altar above.52 Marinangeli, Zaccaria and Millozzi have suggested that
the dressed stone used in the fifteenth-century rearrangement was
taken from the pavement and cladding of this earlier chamber,
although it is equally possible that much of the original floor and
walls could have been left as bare rock.53 The extraordinary depth
of the burial loculus—the factor which had foiled the earlier excava-
tions in 1755 and 1802/3—would have left room for a shallow vault
over such a chamber.54 Within this subterranean space, Francis’s
remains would have been protected by the wrought iron cage that
enveloped the sarcophagus. In addition, grille and coffin were almost
certainly capped by the third travertine slab, which was treated as an
integral part of Francis’s arca by the fifteenth-century rearrangement.
The closure of the tomb would have necessitated the dismantling

ments, Elias had removed an extra 15–20 cubic metres of bedrock over and above
what was necessary for the construction of the reduced loculus as it was found in
1818. Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Il loculo sotto l’altare”, p. 105, give the depth of the
tomb as 375cm (from the pavement of the Lower Church, not including the altar
platform).
50
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Il loculo sotto l’altare”, p. 100; Millozzi, “L’altare mag-
giore”, p. 4.
51
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Quando e da chi fu modificata la tomba”, pp. 219–226,
broadly accepted the tradition of Sixtus’s sealing of the tomb in 1476. Millozzi,
“L’altare maggiore”, pp. 1–13, consolidated this position in response to Gatti’s 1983
monograph.
52
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Il loculo sotto l’altare”, pp. 102–105; Millozzi, “L’altare
maggiore”, p. 8.
53
Most fully developed by Millozzi, “L’altare maggiore”, pp. 9–10; however, the
author’s attempt to connect the travertine slabs from the tomb with the “tribertini
magni” requisitioned by Elias for the Basilica in 1239 needlessly complicates the
issue.
54
Millozzi suggested the presence of a “volta a crociera”; ibid., p. 9.
16 donal cooper

and subsequent reconstruction of the high altar platform, and Millozzi

believed the present misalignment of the altar mensa to be a vestige
of the Quattrocento reconstitution required by this thesis.55
For Marinangeli, Zaccaria and Millozzi, aspects of the archaeo-
logical evidence accorded remarkably well with one of the earliest
visual sources for Francis’s burial—the illuminated ‘F’ initial in a
thirteenth-century antiphonary from the Sacro Convento which depicts
three crippled or lame supplicants before the Saint’s tomb (Fig. 5).56
In the miniature, Francis rests in an open sarcophagus within a
vaulted chamber lit by lamps chained to the ceiling. The upper half
of the initial is completed by a baldachin, apparently on a distinct
architectural plane, which may represent an altar ciborium or some
larger vaulted structure in schematic form.57 All the proponents of
the more open reconstruction have argued that the Sacro Convento
illumination proves the existence of an accessible subterranean chapel
in the late thirteenth century which could admit small numbers of
select visitors. This form of privileged access is held to explain the
Podestà of Perugia’s request in 1260 for leave to go to Assisi “to
venerate the body of Blessed Francis”.58 In the foreground, the three
pilgrims crouch awkwardly on a rocky and uneven floor, which may
have echoed the harsh surfaces of the subterranean chamber.59 No
one would claim that the Saint’s body was visible in the manner
indicated by the illumination, but the removal of the travertine slab

55
Ibid., pp. 2–3, the altar mensa slopes downwards to the left (looking from the
nave).
56
Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, cantorino 2, Ms. 1, fol. 235r. For this illumi-
nation see Giovanni Morello’s entry in The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi, ed.
Giovanni Morello and Laurence B. Kanter (Milan, 1999), pp. 142–142, where it
is dated to ca. 1280.
57
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “La tomba del Santo secondo il sigillo detto di Frate
Elia ed una miniatura del secolo XIII”, p. 222, believed that the upper half of the
initial represents “con linee fortemente stilizzate” the vaults of the Lower Church,
including nine stalls from the friars’ choir. The analysis of the seal in the same arti-
cle is flawed, owing to the inaccurate drawing of the seal made in 1898, see Gatti,
La tomba, p. 120.
58
Ettore Ricci, “Tommaso da Gorzano Podestà di Perugia alla tomba di
S. Francesco”, Miscellanea francescana 34 (1934), pp. 42–45; the Podestà wished to
go to Assisi “pro veneratione corporis beati Francischi”.
59
In The Treasury of Saint Francis, p. 142, Morello described the body of St. Francis
“lying on a high catafalque, carved directly out of the rock”. The Saint’s green
coffin does, however, appear to be distinct from the rocky floor. The harsh surface
serves to emphasise the presence of the Collis Paradisi beneath the Basilica, see Gatti,
La tomba, p. 102.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 17

could have permitted the veneration of Francis’s remains through

the wrought iron grille. Indeed, the combination of metal cage and
stone lid might suggest that this was exactly what the builders of the
tomb had intended.

“In loco firmissimo”

Marinangeli, Zaccaria and Millozzi believed they had identified the
vestiges of a genuine subterranean chapel, accessible until it was
definitively sealed at some point after 1442, most likely by Sixtus IV
in 1476.60 There are, however, compelling reasons to reject this
proposition.
The ‘F’ initial cannot be treated as a straightforward record of
any early tomb arrangement in the Lower Church. Depictions of
saints lying in their tombs constitute a representational convention
by the later Middle Ages, and the Assisi illumination clearly draws
on a generic iconography of supplication ad sanctum. An instructive
contrast may be drawn with the mid thirteenth-century panel in the
Basilica’s Treasury, which groups four of Francis’s post mortem mira-
cles around a standing figure of the Saint. A careful rendering of
the wooden arca at S. Giorgio in the scene to the upper left (Fig. 1)
is balanced by two representations of the high altar in the Lower
Church on the right hand side. In the lower of these two scenes the
sides of the altar are cloaked by a richly worked silk altar frontal,
but the miraculous exorcism above reveals the arcade below the
mensa, replete with oil lamps inside the arches (Fig. 2). Many scholars
have observed that the design of the high altar recalled contemporary
tombs and shrines through the inclusion of an arcade, and under-
lighting the colonnade in this manner must have accentuated the
sepulchral effect.
Unlike the antiphonary initial, the Treasury panel was a public
image, which was probably commissioned to hang in the Lower
Church.61 The reference back to the wooden arca indicates that the

60
Millozzi, “L’altare maggiore”, p. 9, considered the chamber “non un loculo,
dunque, ma un sacello, una vera cappella”. Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Le diverse opi-
nioni”, p. 276, believed that the chamber “fu accessibile fin dal principio”.
61
The image has been linked to the consecration of the high altar in 1253, see
William R. Cook, Images of St. Francis of Assisi in Painting, Stone and Glass from the
Earliest Images to ca. 1320 in Italy: A Catalogue (Florence, 1999), cat. no. 27, pp. 62–63,
18 donal cooper

painter was drawing a conscious parallel between the pilgrim’s expe-

rience in the Lower Church and the earlier arrangement in S. Giorgio.
For both these reasons, the Treasury panel is a more trustworthy
representation of the shrine’s public face, demonstrating that, for the
vast majority of pilgrims to the Lower Church, the high altar would
have stood for St. Francis’s tomb.
There are also difficulties with the “open” interpretation of the
archaeological evidence. Even allowing for the maximum floor area
the proposed chamber would still have been too small to facilitate
general access to the Saint’s sarcophagus, but a more fundamental
problem is how visitors would have descended to the tomb. Wolfgang
Schenkluhn has proposed the presence of a doorway at the base of
the apsidal wall, which could have linked the Sacro Convento to a
tomb arrangement below the Lower Church (Vasari, it will be remem-
bered, had spoken of an old entrance that had been walled-up).62
This possibility was foreseen by Ugo Tarchi in his 1940 reconstruction
of the apse exterior prior to Sixtus IV’s extensive renovation of the
cloister area,63 while Edgar Hertlein later believed that he had found
traces of an entrance to the tomb in the floor of the apse below the
fifteenth-century choir stalls.64 A passageway giving access from the
west would have evoked Early Christian confessio arrangements, notably
the annular crypt below the apse of Old St. Peter’s.65 But Fea’s exca-
vations found no trace of any conduit linking the burial loculus to

193. It was described over the door of the sacristy in the Lower Church in the
1570s see Fra’ Ludovico da Pietralunga. Descrizione della Basilica di S. Francesco d’Assisi.
Introduzione, note al testo e commentario, ed. Pietro Scarpellini (Treviso, 1982), p. 79
(hereafter cited as Fra’ Ludovico).
62
Wolfgang Schenkluhn, S. Francesco in Assisi: Ecclesia specialis. Die Vision Papst
Gregors IX von einer Erneuerung der Kirche (Darmstadt, 1991), pp. 29–30, and fig. 24
on p. 35; passages of disturbed stonework at the base of the apse indicate the posi-
tion of the door. Schenkluhn, however, believed the opening to link the Sacro
Convento directly with the apse of the Lower Church, rather than the tomb below.
63
Ugo Tarchi, L’arte medioevale nell’Umbria e nella Sabina (Milan, 1940), vol. 4, tavv.
LXIV, LXV.
64
Edgar Hertlein, Die Basilika S. Francesco in Assisi. Gestalt—Bedeutung—Herkunft
(Florence, 1964), p. 106; assessed by Schenkluhn, Ecclesia specialis, p. 144. Hertlein’s
observation is impossible to verify following the re-paving of the apsidal area in
1960. An entrance from the choir was also proposed by Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Le
diverse opinioni”, pp. 276–277.
65
The comparison with St. Peter’s is made by Schenkluhn, Ecclesia specialis,
p. 144, although the author’s argument is complicated by his proposal for an ele-
vated podium in the apse of the Lower Church (pp. 79–80; fig. 62).
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 19

either the Lower Church or the Sacro Convento.66 The 1818 reports
are quite specific on this point—the chamber was surrounded by
solid rock on all sides.
The burial of St. Clare in the nearby Basilica of S. Chiara can
shed some further light on this point. Multiple similarities between
their tombs indicate that Clare’s shrine (like her church) was designed
as a pendant to Francis’s. Clare’s body had been interred below the
high altar of S. Chiara in 1260 but her remains, like Francis’s, had
been inaccessible for some time by the nineteenth century.67 A short
excavation in 1850, inspired by the success of the 1818 campaign
in the Lower Church, quickly discovered Clare’s sarcophagus set into
the floor of a barrel-vaulted chamber beneath the crossing (Fig. 6).
At some later date, this space was filled in with mortar and rubble,
but otherwise it was remarkably undisturbed. The survival of a
medieval barrel vault at S. Chiara may well support the presence
of a similar vaulted chamber below the Lower Church, but Clare’s
burial was certainly not accessible from the church above. The exca-
vators in 1850 found no trace of a passage leading to Clare’s burial
loculus, which was surrounded by solid rock on all sides.68 Moreover,
Clare’s cadaver was firmly sealed within her sarcophagus, which was
secured by two heavy iron bands and eight lead clasps.69 She was
unequivocally concealed from view, even within the confines of her
burial chamber.
The comparison with S. Chiara suggests that Francis’s burial cham-
ber was less accessible than Marinangeli and others have supposed,
but it also indicates how this type of subterranean tomb could be
physically and visually linked to the surface. The 1850 excavations
in S. Chiara established that a shaft had connected Clare’s burial
loculus to a grated opening (the so-called fenestella confessionis) set into
the front of the high altar platform above (Figs. 6, 7). The function
of the S. Chiara fenestella was reinforced by an accompanying inscrip-
tion on the altar steps: “Hic iacet corpus S. Clare Virginis”.70

66
Gatti, La tomba, pp. 146–149, 154.
67
For Clare’s tomb see Marino Bigaroni, “Origine e sviluppo storico della chiesa”,
in Marino Bigaroni, Hans-Rudolf Meier and Elvio Lunghi, La Basilica di S. Chiara
in Assisi (Ponte S. Giovanni, PG, 1994), pp. 30–34.
68
Gatti, La tomba, pp. 105, 154, characterized the S. Chiara loculus as a “cella
senza ingressi da nessun lato”.
69
Bigaroni, “Origine e sviluppo”, p. 32.
70
Ibid., p. 30.
20 donal cooper

A very similar aperture, commonly known as the buca delle lam-

pade, still exists in the Lower Church, set into the uppermost step of
the altar platform facing the nave.71 The buca is prominent in six-
teenth-century representations of the tomb, but is likely to be much
older (Fig. 8).72 A 1771 engraving of the high altar denoted the grate
as the “locus” in which Francis’s body lay, adding that three lamps
burn there continuously (Fig. 9).73 The presence of lamps within the
fenestella was earlier noted by Ludovico da Pietralunga in the 1570s
and by other late sixteenth-century sources in the Sacro Convento
archives.74 Furthermore, local documents published by Cesare Cenci
record a lamp or “spera” below the high altar as early as 1446.75
The flickering light in the buca would have alerted the pilgrim
approaching from the nave to the hidden space beneath the altar

71
With regard to the buca, Gatti, La tomba, p. 158, places some credence in an
ambiguous reference from Papini which dated the opening of the aperture to
1509/10, but elsewhere (pp. 133–135) rejects the same passage for dating the con-
struction of the altar platform and pergola to the same years. For Papini’s original
comments see Notizie sicure (1822 edition), pp. 88, 207; (1824 edition) pp. 211–212,
218–219.
72
The grate before the high altar is emphasized in two representations of Francis’s
shrine in Pietro Ridolfi, OFMConv., Historiarum Seraphicae Religionis libri tres (Venice,
1586), pp. 50r (“De liberatis a diversis infirmitatibus”), 250v (“De Admirabili Sepulchro
in quo venerandum corpus B. Francisci conditum est”); both reproduced by Gatti,
La tomba, fig. 17. The accuracy of some of the engravings that illustrate Ridolfi’s
text is debatable, but the topographical representations of the Basilica (p. 247r), the
Porziuncola (p. 252v) and La Verna (p. 262r) are all carefully observed—the sec-
ond of the tomb scenes falls in the same section.
73
On the left-hand side the Latin key for ‘F’ reads: “Locus in quo est Corpus
Serafici P.S. Francisci: ac tres dimisse lampades continuo ardentes”. The print illus-
trated Francesco Antonio Maria Righini’s, Provinciale Ordinis Fratrum Minorum
S. Francisci Conventualium (Rome, 1771).
74
Ludovico da Pietralunga gave a detailed description of the buca: “Nel piano,
nel quarto et ultimo gradile, dalla banda della navata della chiesa, overo intrata,
gli è una pietra assai grandotta over tavola sotto la quale gli è uno sepulcro over
grotta quasi sotto e presso la altare. Il vano . . . dove che de continuo gli arde una
ad minus lampada, il quale li giova a molte infermità.: se acende per una finestra
più longa che larga, nel ultimo et del mezzo del gradile o scalone . . .”, see Fra’
Ludovico, p. 50. The Libro degli Ordini de’Superiori from the 1590s referred to the buca
as a “caverna” and stipulated that “la chiave della Caverna sotto l’Altare maggiore
stia nella cassa delle tre chiavi, et il Lampadaro habbi solamente la chiave dello
sportellino per acconciare la lampada”; cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 145.
75
Cesare Cenci, OFM., Documentazione di vita assisana 1300–1530, vol. 1 (Grottaferrata,
1974), p. 576: “de spera que est sub altare p. nostri Francisci” (1446); there is also
an earlier notice “de altari maiori et spera S. Francisci” from 1438 (p. 538). The
nature of the “spera” is clarified by later references to “socto l’altare dove arda la
spera” (1461) and “pro lumine et spera ardenda ante corpus S. Francisci” (1509),
cited by Cenci, Documentazione, vol. 2 (Grottaferrata, 1975), pp. 663, 982.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 21

platform. By 1405 the friars were selling oil near the high altar, pre-
sumably to elicit on the spot offerings by pilgrims.76 The fenestella
itself would have given the devout viewer kneeling on the steps before
the high altar a dim view into the vaulted chamber below, perhaps
even a distant glimpse of the Saint’s sarcophagus. This was the clos-
est that the average pilgrim to the Lower Church could hope to
come to Francis’s remains.
The interpretation of the textual sources is more problematic, but
one salient fact does emerge—that the tradition of the closed tomb
predates Eugenius’s 1442 letter, which was taken by Marinangeli,
Zaccaria and Millozzi as a terminus post quem for the sealing of the
tomb. Bartolomeo da Pisa provides two separate passages which indi-
cate that the tomb was sealed and inaccessible by the 1390s. Even
if one discounts both of these as later fifteenth-century interpolations,
one can fall back on two sources that have, until now, been over-
looked in the debates over the tomb.77
The first is Pero Tafur’s brief account of the tomb, already cited
above. Tafur visited Assisi in the spring of 1436, six years before
the Perugians sacked the town and appealed to Eugenius.78 It is
inherently unlikely that his comments on Assisi are later insertions,
for the Travels and Adventures have survived through a single copy in
Salamanca, itself probably made from the author’s original manu-
script.79 The text was isolated from the later evolution of Franciscan
historiography, and—excepting the four sentences on Assisi—would
have been of no interest to the Order. Paradoxically, the tangential
nature of Tafur’s account makes him an especially valuable witness.
He lodged at the Sacro Convento for three days with “a servant of

76
See Cenci, Documentazione, vol. 1, p. 287, citing a notarial act “in ecclesia
S. Francisci, in loco ubi venditur oleum, prope altare magnum dicte ecclesie
inferioris”.
77
Bartolomeo’s original manuscript does not survive. The earliest surviving copies
date from the fifteenth century, and are thought to contain many interpolations,
see the comments by the Quarrachi fathers in AF 4 (1906), pp. xxiv–xxxv; AF 5
(1912), pp. xlv–lxxxv; and Gatti, p. 170, note 36 with further bibliography.
78
Letts, Travels and Adventures, p. v; Tafur does not provide many firm dates in
his chronicle, but from Assisi he proceeded directly to Venice, which he left on 17
May, 1436 after a thirty day stay. An approximate estimate would place Tafur in
Assisi at the beginning of April in 1436.
79
Ibid., p. 1; the surviving manuscript in the Biblioteca Patrimonial dates from
the eighteenth century, but faithfully copies the spelling, punctuation and layout of
a fifteenth-century codex.
22 donal cooper

our Cardinal of Castille who was a great friend of mine”, and was
shown the Lower Church (presumably by the friars).80 His was not
a hurried pilgrimage, and his sources seem to have been the friars
themselves, but for Tafur the true location of the tomb was a secret,
an arcanum entrusted only to the Pope, one of his cardinals and a
single friar. Instead, “the place which they show” was surely the high
altar of the Lower Church, perhaps even the buca delle lampade in
the steps of the altar platform.
Tafur’s comments are corroborated by an entry from the Sacro
Convento’s archive, transcribed by Papini in 1824 but subsequently
ignored by Gatti, Marinangeli and Zaccaria. According to Papini’s
transcription, on 23 June, 1380, Fra Niccolò Vannini, senior Sacristan
of the Basilica and later Custodian of the Sacro Convento, issued a
certificate of pilgrimage to one Pietro di Giovanni, who thereby
fulfilled by proxy the vow of the elderly Francesco d’Enrico.81 The
stipulations for the completion of Pietro’s pilgrimage are revealing.
He had attended a Mass in honour of St. Francis, and had “placed
his hand on the altar beneath which lies the body of the Most Holy
Father Francis, in the presence of a number of trustworthy friars
from this convent”.82 His actions confirm that, for both pilgrims and
friars, the high altar of the Lower Church stood for Francis’s shrine.
Pietro di Giovanni touched the altar mensa as he might the Saint’s
tomb. Legally and spiritually, he had fulfilled his obligation.
* * *

80
Ibid., p. 44.
81
For this document see Papini, Notizie sicure (1822 edition), pp. 90, 205; (1824
edition), pp. 89, 216. The source is Archivio del Sacro Convento, Registri 372
(Entrate e uscite del Sacro Convento 1377–1447), fol. 1r. Niccolò Vannini was custodian
of the Sacro Convento from 1382 to 1386, see John R.H. Moorman, Medieval
Franciscan Houses (New York, 1983), p. 37. The phenomenon of vicarious pilgrim-
age is widely documented, and a number of Bolognese testaments specify pilgrim-
ages by proxy to Assisi; see, for example, the 1289 bequest for “cuidam persone
qui vadat ad terram Assixii ad perdonantiam” or that in 1296 for “uni bono homini
qui visitet altare B. Francisci de Assisio”, both cited in AF 9 (1927), pp. 181, 350.
82
Papini, Notizie sicure (1822 edition), p. 205; (1824 edition) p. 216; “. . . et ibi-
dem fecit legere devote unam Missam in honore S. Francisci, et ibidem obtulit
munus suum ad Altare sub quo Corpus Sanctissimi Patris Francisci requiescit, prae-
sentibus aliquibus fratribus fide dignis dicti Conventus”. The same act could also
provoke miracles, see Francesco Bartoli’s description of the cure of a female pil-
grim in 1308, “posita manu sua super altari in quo Corpus beati Francisci condi-
tum requiescit”, in his treatise on the Porziuncola (1330–35), cited by Gatti, La
tomba, p. 99.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 23

It is simply impossible to resolve all the contradictions in the archae-

ological, literary and visual evidence, but some conclusions may be
advanced with reasonable confidence. Whatever the difficulties dur-
ing the actual translation, the 1230 burial was surely planned with
some care, and the tomb should be regarded as a designed arrange-
ment. The subterranean loculus may have been more spacious than
Gatti allowed—on balance, the archaeological record points to a
small chamber, cut out of the mountainside, only partially dressed
in stone, and probably vaulted. The sarcophagus was placed across
this chamber, secured within its iron cage, with a theoretically mov-
able (albeit unbearably heavy) lid of travertine limestone.
These qualifications, however, appear as incidental details beside
the broader picture of a hermetic burial entirely divorced from the
pilgrim’s experience of the Lower Church. The chamber was sur-
rounded by solid rock on all sides, precluding the existence of a gen-
uine entrance passageway. Its interior may have been filled with
mortar and stone in the fifteenth century, but this would have had
a marginal impact on the visibility of Francis’s remains. Tafur cor-
roborates Bartolomeo da Pisa’s assertion that, before 1442, the tomb
was either sealed, or—at the very most—was accessible only in extra-
ordinary circumstances. The high altar was invariably termed the
altar of Blessed Francis in local documents, and Padre Vannini’s
certificate of pilgrimage confirms that the altar mensa was synony-
mous with the Saint’s shrine.83 The burial loculus below was signalled
by the buca delle lampade, the oil lamps within the fenestella joining the
lanterns around the altar block above in a chorus of flickering light,
beckoning pilgrims in the nave towards the tomb.84

83
When they appealed to the Commune for assistance during the floods of July
1311, the friars of the Sacro Convento stated that the water was flowing “super
altare ipsius b. Francisci”, cited by Gatti, La tomba, p. 134. In a letter from 1279,
Nicholas IV recalled the healing of a blind man in 1232, who had been “ductus
ad altare beati Francisci”, cited by Nessi, “La tomba e i documenti”, SFPI 60
(1960), p. 430. Further examples are found in Cenci, Documentazione, vol. 1, pp. 88,
147, 228.
84
The relationship between the buca and the other lamps around the tomb under-
lies a later seventeenth-century tale from the life of S. Giuseppe of Cupertino (†1663).
While Giuseppe prayed at night before the high altar, a demon with iron shoes
entered the Lower Church and extinguished all of the lamps around the altar, only
for Francis to emerge from the tomb. Taking a flame from one of the lamps in
the buca, the Saint then re-lit all of the lamps around the altar, driving the demon
away in the process; cited by Papini, Notizie sicure (1824 edition), pp. 92, 218; orig-
inal text in Acta Sanctorum Septembris, Tomus V (Antwerp, 1755), pp. 1033–1034.
24 donal cooper

(ii) Francis’s tomb and the Lower Church

The Opening of the Transept

In the absence of an accessible crypt, the high altar of the Lower
Church served as the devotional goal for pilgrims seeking Francis’s
shrine. This situation placed conflicting demands on space in the
transept and apse. As well as marking Francis’s tomb, the high altar
functioned as the principal altar of the Lower Church, and a degree
of decorum had to be maintained around the consecrated mensa, par-
ticularly during the celebration of Mass and other liturgical offices.
The Lower Basilica also functioned as the conventual church for the
friars of the Sacro Convento, and in the thirteenth century the
requirements of monastic seclusion dictated the presence of a sub-
stantial marble choir screen which separated the crossing bay from
the main body of the nave (Fig. 11; T). Irene Hueck has convinc-
ingly reconstructed this screen from its surviving fragments as a mon-
umental two-storied structure, pierced only by three narrow doorways.85
Both the monastic fabric and the liturgical ritual of the Lower
Church must have hindered the path of pilgrims to the high altar.
Furthermore, it is likely that for much of the time women would
have been prevented from advancing beyond the choir screen—this
restriction is suggested by Angela of Foligno’s accounts of her visits
to the Lower Church, and also by the representation of the Crib at
Greccio in the St. Francis cycle, where the women gathered around
the door of the screen are evidently forbidden from entering the
sanctuary.86 Similar tensions are explicitly recorded in relation to the
pre-1233 burial of St. Dominic in the floor of the cappella maggiore
of S. Nicolò nelle Vigne in Bologna, close to that church’s high
altar.87 A number of early Dominican sources express disquiet at the

85
Irene Hueck, “Der Lettner der Unterkirche von S. Francesco in Assisi”, Mitteil-
ungen des kunsthistorisches Instituts in Florenz 28 (1984), pp. 173–202. Hueck (p. 199)
dated the structure to ca. 1253. For a less monumental alternative to Hueck’s recon-
struction see Jürgen Wiener, Die Bauskulptur von S. Francesco in Assisi (Werl/Westfalen,
1991), pp. 156–162.
86
For this reading of the Crib at Greccio as a reflection of the Lower Church see
Pietro Scarpellini, “Assisi e i suoi monumenti nella pittura dei secoli XIII–XIV” in
Assisi al tempo di S. Francesco: atti del V Convegno internazionale, Assisi, 13–16 ottobre 1977;
Società internazionale di studi francescani (Assisi, 1978), pp. 101–108.
87
For Dominic’s tomb see Joanna Cannon, “Dominican Patronage of the Arts
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 25

devotions and offerings of the faithful, the clear implication being

that pilgrimage to the tomb was disrupting the liturgical life of the
church.88
In Bologna, the Preaching Friars resolved the problem in 1233
by relocating St. Dominic’s shrine to the lay side of the choir screen
in their new church of S. Domenico, thereby freeing the upper nave
and high altar for the friars’ use.89 In the Lower Church at Assisi,
the Franciscans adopted a very different approach. Around 1300
they took the radical step of dismantling the choir screen in the
nave, salvaging some sections to construct a small cantoria on the left
side of the nave.90 At roughly the same time the nave walls were
pierced to allow the construction of an impressive series of private
chapels, satisfying the desire of prominent families and individuals
for burial ad sanctum.91 Those chapels on the north side of the church
were also connected by a sequence of doorways that together formed
a passageway running parallel to the main nave. The creation of
this “side-aisle”, together with the removal of the choir screen, must
have greatly eased access to the high altar, allowing pilgrims to cir-
culate around the transept area. As Janet Robson demonstrates else-
where in this volume, the frescoes in the transept and the Magdalen

in Central Italy ca. 1220–c. 1320: The Provincia Romana”, Ph.D. dissertation, Courtauld
Institute of Art, 1980, pp. 169–175; Anita Fiderer Moskowitz, Nicola Pisano’s Arca
di S. Domenico and Its Legacy (London, 1994).
88
Jordan of Saxony described how the faithful visiting the church “hung wax
effigies of eyes, hands, feet and other bodily parts over the tomb of the Blessed”
which were then torn down and smashed by the friars, see Venturino Alce, “Il con-
vento di S. Domenico in Bologna nel secolo XIII”, Culta Bononia 4 (1972), p. 151.
89
G.G. Meersseman, OP., “L’architecture dominicaine au XIIIe siècle: Législation
et pratique”, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 16 (1946), pp. 155–156; “dont le culte
populaire pouvait désormais se dérouler librement sans déranger la liturgie”. Joanna
Cannon presented substantial new research on Dominican shrines in a paper enti-
tled “Founders and Followers II: The Burial and Commemoration of Saints and
Beati among the Dominicans of central Italy” at the Association of Art Historians’
annual conference of 2000, with special emphasis on the opportunities for access
and circulation afforded by free-standing tombs on the model of Dominic’s shrine.
90
Hueck, “Der Lettner”, p. 176, observed that the screen was probably dis-
mantled less then fifty years after its construction. The original piscinae and ambries
for the side altars set on the screen’s upper storey can still be seen high on the
walls in the first bay of the nave. Other sections from the screen seem to have
been reused as a revetment above the altar in the Magdalen chapel.
91
For the construction of the side chapels see Irene Hueck, “Die Kapellen der
Basilika S. Francesco in Assisi: die Auftraggeber und die Franziskaner”, in Patronage
and Public in the Trecento, Proceedings of the St. Lambrecht Symposium, Abtei St. Lambrecht,
Styria, 16–19 July, 1984, ed. Vincent Moleta (Florence, 1986), pp. 81–104.
26 donal cooper

Chapel were conceived as an edifying accompaniment for the pil-

grim’s progress around the high altar.92
While the removal of the choir screen undoubtedly improved access
to the transept, it also brought the functional contradiction of the
high altar platform—now exposed at the centre of the crossing—
into sharper focus. Pilgrims could not be left to climb around or
over the altar mensa as they might do with a genuine arca or raised
sarcophagus.93 This dilemma was resolved by the construction of a
colonnade or pergola around the high altar platform, comprising twelve
columns topped by an architrave, with its arcade closed by elabo-
rate wrought-iron grates.94 The pergola in the Lower Church is some-
times associated with Sixtus IV’s renovations of the 1470s, but it can
be convincingly dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century. In
functional terms, its construction was consequent on the demolition
of the choir screen, and must have been foreseen before the screen
was taken down. As with the cantoria, the pergola very likely reused
decorative elements from the choir screen’s rich marble and cosmati
façade.95
Fragments of the Lower Church pergola are today scattered through-
out the Sacro Convento, and the recomposition of its original struc-
ture is greatly complicated by the controversial renovation campaign
led by Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle in 1870–71. Until then the per-
gola had survived in situ in the Lower Church, but Cavalcaselle recon-
structed the colonnade around the high altar of the Upper Church,
where it appears in the earliest photographs of the interior.96 When

92
See Robson in this volume, pp. 39–70.
93
Iron cancelli were sometimes added to free-standing, elevated tombs to dis-
courage over-zealous devotion. For example, a grille was placed around St. Dominic’s
tomb in 1288, see Alce, “Il convento”, p. 167.
94
For the pergola in the Lower Church see Bigaroni, “Origine e sviluppo”, pp.
26–28.
95
A fragment of the pergola architrave is reproduced by Hueck, “Der Lettner”,
p. 184, fig. 9, although the author excludes it from her reconstruction of the choir
screen due to discrepancies in dimensions (pp. 180–181).
96
For Cavalcaselle’s cavalier campaign of restoration see Irene Hueck, “La Basilica
francescana di Assisi nell’Ottocento: alcuni documenti su restauri progettati ed inter-
venti eseguiti”, Bollettino d’arte 66, no. 12 (October–December, 1981), pp. 143–152;
see fig. 5 for a photograph of the Upper Church with the pergola around the high
altar. The acrimonious correspondence over Cavalcaselle’s historicism at Assisi is
gathered together in Dibattimento del giornalismo italiano intorno alla rimozione del coro di
Maestro Domenico da S. Severino dalla Basilica di S. Francesco in Assisi (Perugia, 1873),
esp. pp. 139–145 for Luigi Carattoli’s criticisms in the Osservatore Romano on the
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 27

Cavalcaselle’s reckless interventions were reversed at the end of the

nineteenth century, the pergola was not returned to the Lower Church.
Instead, sections of the colonnade were inserted into the upper storey
of the Chiostro dei Morti (Fig. 10), while some of the wrought-iron
cancelli were employed to close off the main cloister of the Sacro
Convento.97 The pergola’s basic structure can be deduced from the
1771 engraving of the high altar platform, although this omits the
cancelli and updates certain passages of ornament to suit eighteenth-
century taste (Fig. 9). For example, the surviving fragments and early
photographic evidence establish that the architrave bore intricate
bands of cosmati inlay rather than the foliate decoration illustrated
in the 1771 print.98 The pergola has sometimes been dated to Sixtus
IV’s rebuilding work in the 1470s, but several factors indicate that
the precinct was already in place by the early fourteenth century.99
On the basis of the cosmati decoration and carved elements, Pietro
Scarpellini has dated the surviving fragments in the Chiostro dei
Morti to the end of the thirteenth century.100 The “crates ferreas”
described around the high altar in the Lower Church by Fra Francesco
Bartoli in the 1330s probably refer to the colonnade’s iron cancelli.101
The design and manufacture of the cancelli themselves, with their
hot-hammered scrollwork, can be dated to the same period.102 A

removal of the pergola from the Lower Church. Cavalcaselle, who had first dismissed
the pergola as a seventeenth-century addition, believed he had identified signs of its
original collocation around the high altar of the Upper Church.
97
Some of the architrave fragments are now hidden behind the conservation
cabinets in the Chiostro dei Morti; I am grateful to Padre Gerhard Ruf of the
Sacro Convento for the opportunity to examine the Chiostro dei Morti and the
cancelli in the main cloister.
98
Vasari described the pergola accordingly; “intorno al detto altare sono grate di
ferro grandissime, con ricchi ornamenti di marmo e di musaico . . .”; Le vite, vol. 2,
p. 51.
99
Marinangeli-Zaccaria, “Le diverse opinioni”, pp. 275–276; Millozzi, “L’altare
maggiore”, pp. 12–13; the later dating derives from Pietralunga’s attribution of the
iron cancelli to Maestro Gasperino da Lugano, documented in Assisi from 1463
onwards, see Fra’ Ludovico, p. 49. In his commentary Scarpellini (pp. 259–260)
argued that the surviving fragments are much too old to be Gasparino’s work, and
that the Lombard had probably restored an existing structure.
100
See Scarpellini’s commentary to Pietralunga’s text, Fra’ Ludovico, p. 259.
101
Fratris Francisci Bartholi de Assisio. Tractatus de Indulgentia S. Mariae de Portiuncola,
ed. Paul Sabatier (Paris 1900), p. 83; “Quumque frater . . . post crates ferreas altaris
beati patris nostri Francisci oraret”.
102
For English grilles with similar back-to-back scroll designs produced during
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Jane Geddes, Medieval Decorative Ironwork in
England (London, 1999), pp. 141–145.
28 donal cooper

further point of reference is provided by the analogous pergola that

still stands around the high altar in the Basilica of S. Chiara (Fig. 7).103
The figurative and foliate carvings on the capitals of the Clarissan
precinct indicate a date around 1300, and the colonnade in S. Chiara
is likely to have been modelled on that in the Lower Church.104 In
S. Chiara and the Lower Church the two pergolae functioned as pro-
tective cages, shielding their respective high altars from the devo-
tional energy expended on the tombs below. Their form was dictated
by the inherent difficulties of focusing both relic cult and liturgical
ritual on a single point in the church interior.
With its dense wrought-iron cancelli, the pergola protected the high
altar of the Lower Church on all sides, leaving only the central bay
on the nave side free for pilgrims to venerate and approach the high
altar and the buca delle lampade.105 The manner in which the cancelli
ringed the altar, thereby transforming it into a free-standing precinct,
strongly suggests that pilgrims could circulate around the altar plat-
form. Fra Francesco Bartoli described friars praying at the tomb
“post crates ferreas”, which may refer to the area immediately behind
the high altar.106 The case for the transformation of the entire transept
area into a circulatory space around the tomb is supported by some
related alterations to the layout of the Lower Church, also effected

103
For a comparison of the two pergolae in Assisi see Bigaroni, “Origine e sviluppo”,
pp. 24–30; and also Hans-Rudolf Meier’s essay, “Protomonastero e chiesa di pel-
legrinaggio”, in the same volume, pp. 126–130.
104
For the dating of the S. Chiara capitals to the beginning of the fourteenth
century, and a 1319 reference to “cancellos ferros” in the church, see Meier,
“Protomonastero”, pp. 127–129. The primacy of the S. Chiara pergola, suggested
by Bigaroni (p. 28), seems the less likely path of influence.
105
The opening in the nave side of the colonnade is indicated by a number of
later representations of the pergola in the Lower Church, see for example Giovambattista
Mariani’s 1821 engraving reproduced by Bigaroni, “Origine e sviluppo”, p. 27.
106
The choir stalls constructed between 1467 and 1471, which today fill the apse,
probably replace an earlier choir precinct. A choir in the Lower Church is docu-
mented from 1342, see Cenci, Documentazione, vol. 1, p. 88. However, two notarial
acts from 1430 and 1434 were redacted “in choro dicte ecclesie, ante altare mag-
num dicte ecclesie inferioris”; ibid., pp. 487, 513. This should probably be read
as the space between the high altar and an apsidal choir, rather than a precinct
in the upper nave. A payment in 1447 for “cortine a pie’ del coro del convento”
(p. 585) may indicate that fabric hangings could divide the choir from the transept
area. It is assumed here that, as today, the choir would not have impeded the pas-
sage of pilgrims behind the high altar. I would follow Hueck, “Der Lettner”, p.
191, in placing the thirteenth-century choir between the original choir screen and
the high altar.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 29

around the turn of the thirteenth century. Little is known of the

thirteenth-century decoration of the transept and crossing, from which
Cimabue’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with St. Francis represents an iso-
lated survival. Pietralunga implied a more extensive scheme when
he remarked of Cimabue’s fresco that “they say it was not destroyed
like the others”, and traces of thirteenth-century frescoed ornament
are still visible today around the base of the crossing vault.107 The
precise arrangement of the side altars before 1300 is also unclear,
but it is likely that one was set below the Cimabue around the mid
point of the north transept’s east wall, mirroring the orientation of
the side altars in the Upper Church above.108 All of this was swept
away in the early fourteenth century, when the two side altars ded-
icated to St. John the Evangelist (south transept) and St. Elizabeth
of Hungary (north transept) were pushed into the far corners of their
respective bays (Fig. 11; JE, E). Pietro Lorenzetti’s famous fictive
bench surely reflects the cramped location of the St. John altar in
the north-eastern corner of the north transept (Figs. 12 and 13),
while the two fresco altarpieces by Lorenzetti and Simone Martini
were restricted to low retables, freeing the walls above for an integrated
programme of narrative cycles that traversed the entire transept.109
The repositioning of the two side altars freed the transept from litur-
gical clutter, thereby minimising any disruption to the circulation of
pilgrims around the high altar.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, taken together, the var-
ious alterations made to the Lower Church resulted from a coherent
plan to improve access to the transept area, set in train in the final
years of the thirteenth century. In his 1288 bull Reducentes ad sedulae,
the Franciscan Pope Nicholas IV had linked the reconstruction and

107
Fra’ Ludovico, p. 70: “Dicano che non fu guasto comme li altri”.
108
The presence of such an altar may be suggested by the terms of Puccio di
Ventura’s testament of 1300, discussed by Hueck, “Die Kapellen”, pp. 86–87;
Silvestro Nessi, La Basilica di S. Francesco in Assisi e la sua documentazione storica (Assisi,
1994), pp. 429, 448–449. An altar dedicated to the Immaculate Conception was
later installed below the Cimabue in the fifteenth century, see Nessi, p. 428.
109
For the side altars see Scarpellini’s commentary in Fra’ Ludovico, pp. 323–326
(St. Elizabeth); 328–340 (St. John the Evangelist and south transept); for Simone
Martini’s fresco altarpiece for the St. Elizabeth chapel see also Adrian S. Hoch,
“Beata Stirps, Royal Patronage and the Identification of the Sainted Rulers in the
St. Elizabeth Chapel at Assisi”, Art History 15 (1992), pp. 279–295. A 1360 refer-
ence to “una chiave per la capella di Santa Elisabetta” may suggest that the chapel
had an altar enclosure by that date, see Nessi, La Basilica, p. 427.
30 donal cooper

enlargement of the Basilica of San Francesco to the large numbers

of friars and pilgrims that were flocking to Assisi.110 Bruno Zanardi
and others have noted that Nicholas’s direction of alms to “. . . reparari,
aedificare, emendari, ampliari . . .” the Basilica must refer to the
structural work planned for the Lower Church, rather than the com-
pletion of the pictorial scheme upstairs.111 The rationale behind this
rearrangement must have been largely pragmatic. Some form of
ambulatory would have represented a more elegant architectural solu-
tion, but the restricted site of the Collis Paradisi offered no opportu-
nity for an ambitious extension to the Basilica, nor was there room
to relocate the shrine elsewhere within the Lower Church.112 At this
date, the removal of a choir screen was an extraordinary measure,
and the needs of the conventual liturgy were hereby sacrificed in
the interests of Francis’s shrine.113 In terms of sacred space, the new
arrangement established the high altar and—by association—the
Saint’s tomb as the visual focus for the entire Lower Church in a
manner that had not been foreseen by the original thirteenth-century
architecture.

110
Bullarium Franciscanum, vol. 4, pp. 22–23: “. . . innumera fratrum vestri Ordinis
confluit multitudo, quodque Asisii civitas brevi concluditur spatio . . .”
111
Bruno Zanardi, Giotto e Pietro Cavallini: La questione di Assisi e il cantiere medievale
della pittura a fresco (Milan, 2002), p. 212.
112
In the twelfth century, Abbot Suger had famously eased the problems of access
and circulation at St. Denis through architectural expansion, notably the construc-
tion of a spacious ambulatory. Suger had vividly described the earlier overcrowd-
ing of pilgrims in his De Consecratione, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and
Representation (London, 1996), pp. 18–20. Giovanni Lorenzoni has suggested that
between 1310 and 1350, St. Anthony of Padua’s tomb was located in the central
radial chapel of the Santo, with the church’s ambulatory constructed specifically for
the purpose of easing the flow of pilgrims to and from his tomb, cited by Sarah
Blake McHam, The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian
Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge, 1994), p. 11.
113
For the early presence of choir screens or tramezzi in Italian mendicant churches
see Donal Cooper, “In medio ecclesiae: Screens, Crucifixes and Shrines in the Franciscan
Church Interior in Italy ca. 1230–ca. 1400”, Ph.D. dissertation, Courtauld Institute
of Art, 2000, pp. 41–105. The removal of the choir screen in the Lower Church,
together with the papal arrangement of the Upper Church, may have influenced
more open liturgical arrangements in several other Franciscan churches belonging
to the Order’s Umbrian province, see Donal Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures
and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria”, Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001), pp. 1–54.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 31

Pilgrimage and Thaumaturgy at Assisi

Delineating a plan, however, is not the same as discerning the moti-
vation behind it. The reconstruction of the Lower Church must have
been carried forward at enormous expense, not to mention the result-
ing disruption to the shrine and the Sacro Convento. Why was such
a comprehensive programme of renewal deemed necessary? In 1288
Nicholas had linked the reconstruction of the Basilica to the needs
of pilgrims, but the reorganisation of the transept in the Lower
Church was arguably more than an exercise in crowd control.
There is circumstantial evidence that the prior arrangement had
not proved conducive to a flourishing relic cult. In his Vita Prima of
1228–9, Thomas of Celano had celebrated the “new miracles that
are constantly occurring at [Francis’s] tomb, and, as the prayers
increase, remarkable aid is given to body and soul. The blind recover
sight, the deaf regain hearing, the lame walk again, the mute speak,
those with gout jump, lepers are cleansed, those with swelling see it
reduced, and those suffering the burden of many different diseases
obtain the relief for which they have longed. His dead body heals
living bodies, just as when living it raised dead souls”.114 This litany
of thaumaturgical achievement met an expected criterion for a saint
of Francis’s stature. Celano, however, was writing prior to the 1230
translation and these miracles all occurred at the humble wooden
shrine in S. Giorgio.
The character of Celano’s later Tractatus de Miraculis Beati Francisci
(1250–52) is very different, with few post mortem miracles described
before the Saint’s tomb.115 The imbalance is even more pronounced
in the collection of miracles appended to Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior,
while the fresco cycle of Francis’s life painted in the Upper Church
during the 1290s omits any direct reference to the Saint’s shrine in
the Lower Church below.116 Unlike the wooden shrine in S. Giorgio

114
Early Documents 1, pp. 290–291.
115
See Early Documents 2, pp. 421 (for a commitment to visit the shrine); 423 (the
revival of the boy at Suessa, see below note 130); 445 (the healing of Brother
Giacomo of Iseo immediately after the 1230 translation); 454 (Pietro of Foligno
touches Francis’s tomb in thanks for his exorcism); 455 (a possessed girl from Norcia
is freed before the altar of St. Francis which she then kisses); 465 (healing of Lord
Trasmondo Anibaldi’s companion before Francis’s tomb); the text also includes some
of the miracles from Celano’s first life which related to the S. Giorgio tomb, see
pp. 458–460.
116
For the instances in Bonaventure’s text see Early Documents 2, pp. 658 (the
32 donal cooper

(which was faithfully depicted on a number of the early Vita panels:

Fig. 1) the high altar of the Lower Church developed no icono-
graphic tradition of its own, appearing only on the Tesoro panel
cited above (Fig. 2), and a closely related image now in the Vatican.117
The reasons behind this change in emphasis were undoubtedly
complex, but the unresponsive nature of the Lower Church arrange-
ment during the thirteenth century is implied by a curious tradition
associated with the nearby tomb of Brother William of England.
William (†ca. 1232) was one of Francis’s first companions, and was
buried with several of his early confrères in the right transept of the
Lower Church, close to the high altar (Fig. 11; W). William’s tomb,
however, seems quickly to have outshone Francis’s in terms of post
mortem miracles. The resulting embarrassment was such that Elias of
Cortona, then Minister General, felt moved to “approach his tomb
and admonish . . . the deceased not to detract from the glory of St.
Francis with his miracles. From that time [William] worked no more
miracles”.118 This extraordinary situation can only reflect a perceived
lack of thaumaturgical efficacy on the part of Francis’s tomb.
Furthermore, by the late thirteenth century, the Basilica was no
longer the sole—or even the major—focus for pilgrimage at Assisi.
Thanks to a number of recent studies, it is finally becoming possi-
ble to set St. Francis’s shrine within wider networks of pilgrimage
in central Italy and beyond.119 The emerging picture stresses the

raising of the boy at Suessa, see below note 130); 660–661 (the miraculous recov-
ery of a woman struck by a stone from the pulpit in the Lower Church, see below
note 128); 676 (a commitment to go in person on pilgrimage to Francis’s tomb by
Renaud, a priest from Poitiers). Bonaventure’s text also includes two miracles from
Celano’s first life concerning the S. Giorgio tomb (p. 675).
117
Cook, Images, pp. 62–63, 192–193.
118
From the Chronica XXIV Generalium; AF 3 (1897), p. 217; “ad eius sepulcrum
accedens praecepit cum magna confidentia et fide mortuo, ne cum suis miraculis
sancti Patris Francisci gloriam offuscaret. Qui ex tunc nulla miracula fecit”. A sim-
ilar reading of the William story in relation to the scarcity of miracles in the Lower
Church has recently been advanced by Chiara Frugoni, “L’Ombra della Porziuncola
nella Basilica Superiore di Assisi”, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz 45
(2001), pp. 353–361.
119
See, for example, Paolo Caucci von Saucken, “Vie di pellegrinaggio verso
Assisi”, in Assisi anno 1300, ed. Stefano Brufani and Enrico Menestò (S. Maria degli
Angeli, 2002), pp. 249–266; as well as Mario Sensi’s essay, “Il pelegrinaggio al
Perdono di Assisi e la tavola di prete Ilario di Viterbo”, in the same volume, pp.
267–326. For an overview of pilgrimage in Umbria, see Mario Sensi, “Le vie e la
civiltà dei pellegrinaggi nell’Italia centrale: L’esempio umbro”, in Le vie e la civiltà
dei pellegrinaggi nell’Italia centrale. Atti del convegno di studio, Ascoli Piceno, 21–22 maggio,
1999, ed. Enrico Menestò (Ascoli Piceno, 2000), pp. 111–131.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 33

growing importance of the Porziuncola over this period, as the ple-

nary indulgence granted by Honorius III to St. Francis for the church
of S. Maria degli Angeli gradually gained popular acceptance.120 The
feast of the Perdono on 2 August became the cause of mass pilgrim-
age to Assisi, and Nicholas IV had already set the Porziuncola on
a par with the Basilica in his 1288 bull.121 In 1313, when Angelo
Clareno sought a Franciscan analogy for the mass fervour envelop-
ing Peter John Olivi’s tomb in Narbonne, he cited the crowds that
gathered “in festo Sancte Marie de Portiuncola” rather than those
venerating Francis’s tomb in the Basilica.122 The Porziuncola and the
Basilica were perceived very differently by Franciscan writers, and
they came to represent conflicting ideals of conventual life and wor-
ship. This nascent rivalry would later be institutionalised as the two
shrines were given to different branches of the Order, but it is already
evident in some of the miracle stories collected by Francesco Bartoli.123
The physical reconfiguration of the transept area in the Lower
Church in the years around 1300, followed by the subsequent renewal
of the accompanying pictorial decoration, represented a concerted
effort to re-establish the tomb and its surroundings as the fulcrum
for Francis’s cult in Assisi. The impetus for this unprecedented pro-
gramme of works had complex origins. It reflected not only the
numerical pressure of pilgrims, but also the perceived need to trans-
form the pilgrim’s experience of the tomb, at a time when the
Basilica’s claim to Francis’s powers of intercession needed to be
reasserted in the face of the popular appeal of the Perdono indulgence
at the Porziuncola.

120
For the Porziuncola indulgence see now Mario Sensi, Il Perdono di Assisi
(S. Maria degli Angeli, 2002), esp. pp. 83–86 for the important role played by the
Franciscan Bishop of Assisi, Teobaldo Pontano, in promoting the Perdono at the end
of the thirteenth century.
121
Bullarium Franciscanum, vol. 4, pp. 22–23: “. . . ad eam [the Basilica], in qua
ipsius sancti corpus gloriosissimum requiescit, ac etiam ad ecclesiam S. Marie de
Portiuncula . . .”
122
For Clareno’s text see Franz Ehrle, SJ., “Die Spiritualen”, Archiv für Litteratur
und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 1 (Berlin, 1885), p. 544.
123
See, for example, the exorcism at the Portiuncola of a woman who had ear-
lier sought release in the Basilica without success, see Tractatus de Indulgentia, pp.
62–63.
34 donal cooper

Conclusion

From its inception in 1230 the shrine of St. Francis at Assisi had to
reconcile the demands of pilgrimage and popular devotion with the
needs of a major monastic complex. In developing the Lower Church,
the friars were largely constrained by the architectural choices made
during the building of the double basilica. Moreover, the original
decision to bury Francis beneath the high altar in imitation of older
Roman practice was perpetuated and cemented by the fear that his
remains would be removed from Assisi by force. Francis’s body there-
fore remained physically and visually separated from the flow of pil-
grims in the Lower Church throughout the medieval period. This
distance, coupled with the insistence that the tomb contained the
Saint’s whole and undivided body, resulted in a cult shorn of major
relics.
Contemporary responses to Francis’s shrine can be better gauged
through a comparison with other Italian shrines in the thirteenth
century. It is likely that Francis’s 1230 burial below the high altar
at Assisi was intended to evoke Early Christian martyr burials, befitting
the Saint’s status as the founder of a new apostolate. In this respect,
however, Francis’s tomb ran counter to the dominant trends in thir-
teenth-century shrine provision. The elevated arrangement conceived
in 1233 for the new tomb of St. Dominic in Bologna represented a
far more influential prototype.124 Raised tombs bequeathed due sta-

124
The contrast between this arrangement and the tomb of St. Francis was high-
lighted by Cannon, 1980, p. 172; “The general Italian practice had been [before
1233] to hide venerated bodies and relics away in crypts or behind screens and
enclosures: even St. Francis was probably buried in this way. The Dominicans chose
to make their founder’s tomb visible and accessible to pilgrims”. As well as posing
problems for the proper functioning of the church, Dominic’s initial burial in the
floor of S. Nicolò nelle Vigne was now perceived as unworthy (compare Peter
Ferrandus’s comment that “it was seen as unsuitable that the bones of his body
should be set in the ground beneath our feet” with Humbert of Romans justification
for the new 1233 arrangement: “. . . since the sanctity of the holy man could no
longer be hidden . . . his body, which had hitherto resided in a humble tomb, had
to be moved with honour to a higher place”; both cited by Cannon, p. 170).
Elevated tombs were often related to Luke 11:33, “No man, when he hath lighted
a candle, putteth it in a secret place . . . but on a candlestick, that they which come
in may see the light”; burials below high altars to the vision of the martyrs beneath
the altar from Revelations 6:9. This material will be developed further in Cannon’s
forthcoming book, Art and Order. The Dominicans of Central Italy and Visual Culture in
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 35

tus to holy bodies and facilitated contemporary supplicatory and

votive practices. Frequently placed to the west of choir screens (as
in Bologna), this new generation of shrines eased lay access and
avoided disruption to the liturgy. The tomb of St. Anthony in the
Santo at Padua followed this model, as did the shrines of many
Franciscan beati across central Italy.125 While Francis’s own vita inspired
the new biographies of these holy men and women, his tomb offered
no such template for their cults.
The atypical nature of Francis’s shrine in relation to other men-
dicant examples is fundamental for any understanding of the evolv-
ing transept arrangement in the Lower Church. Even before 1442,
the tomb’s inaccessibility would surprise Pero Tafur, while Bartolomeo
da Pisa was drawn to rationalise the sealed burial through its con-
formity to the tomb of Christ. Scholarly efforts to reconstruct Francis’s
tomb have consistently focused on the concealment of the Saint’s
remains. This article has argued that a concerted attempt was made
around the year 1300 to render the shrine more open, but even
here the available options were dictated by the initial choices made
in 1230. Unusual circumstances provoked unique solutions—the demo-
lition of a choir screen in a monastic church, and the construction
of a pergola around the high altar that (S. Chiara aside) finds only
the most generic analogies in Italian church furniture from the period.
* * *
Of course, the most remarkable resolution of the problems pre-
sented by Francis’s shrine lay in the creation of a pictorial pro-
gramme of unprecedented scope and complexity. A new reading of
the transept frescoes, assuming the viewpoint of the pilgrim, is
advanced by Janet Robson elsewhere in this volume, although some
sections of the programme—above all the Vele—continue to resist

125
For the successive burials of St. Anthony see Blake McHam, The Chapel of St.
Anthony, pp. 10–13; Anthony was placed in an elevated tomb in 1263, although this
was initially beside the high altar of his incomplete Basilica. His tomb was located
in the left transept, to the west of the choir screen, by 1350 at the latest. The
Santo’s ambulatory may have been constructed to facilitate access to an interme-
diate burial in the central radial chapel, see above, note 112. Even in those instances
where the Franciscans opted for burials below high altars, the remains seem to have
been visible and accessible. For the arrangements at Sansepolcro and Città di
Castello see Donal Cooper, “Spinello Aretino in Città di Castello: The lost model
for Sassetta’s Sansepolcro polyptych”, Apollo 154 (August, 2001), pp. 22–29.
36 donal cooper

art historical interpretation.126 These cycles were created in dialogue

with the tomb, and over time they came to participate in the tra-
ditions that surrounded the shrine. The surviving documentation only
provides a partial view of what must have been an intricate topog-
raphy of miraculous connotations, but Pietro Lorenzetti’s fresco in
the south transept may well have been the miraculous, bleeding
image of the Stigmatisation specified in the archives of the Sacro
Convento. Blood from this fresco was collected in a linen towel that
was recorded amongst the Basilica’s relics by the 1590s.127 The stone
capital that had tumbled from the choir screen of the Lower Church
in the mid-thirteenth century, resulting in Francis’s miraculous revival
of a woman struck by its fall, was hung above the high altar (by
the 1570s at the latest, but possibly much earlier).128 The suspended
piece of masonry would have echoed the similar miracle worked by
the Saint amidst the rubble at Suessa, commemorated in two fres-
coes in the north transept.129 The Suessa miracle was in turn linked
to the high altar of the Lower Church through the offerings vowed
to the altar by the mother of the child revived by Francis.130 The

126
Robson, pp. 39–70.
127
The topographical record of the Lower Church compiled for the then Minister
General, Filippo Gesualdo, in 1597 recorded “un panno macchiato di sangue, quale
uscí in gran copia da una imagine delle stimmate di S. Francesco dipinta in muro”,
Archivio del Sacro Convento, Registri 24, fol. 46v. If this notice is read narrowly
to refer to a fresco of the Stigmatisation in the Basilica (as opposed to a non-specific
image of St. Francis bearing the Stigmata) then Lorenzetti’s transept fresco and the
analogous scene in the St. Francis Cycle are the only credible candidates.
128
In the 1570s, Pietralunga described the stone (now in the Sacristy in the
Lower Church) hanging on an iron chain “nella volta a man dextra”; Fra’ Ludovico,
pp. 48–49. Several years later, Gesualdo’s 1597 description places the stone over
the high altar: “al presente giorno si vede appicata con una catena di ferro alla
volta dell’altare maggiore”, Archivio del Sacro Convento, Registri 24, fol. 53r. The
capital, replete with iron ring, is now kept in the Basilica’s inner sacristy, it is illus-
trated by Hueck, “Der Lettner”, p. 185, fig. 11. Frugoni, “L’Ombra della Porziuncola”,
p. 360, has dated the miracle to 1235.
129
The two Suessa episodes are discussed in greater detail by Robson, pp. 39–
70. The post mortem miracle scenes were among the first elements of the new transept
scheme to be started, and were probably left half finished for several years follow-
ing 1297, for their dating see Zanardi, Giotto e Pietro Cavallini, pp. 194–197.
130
In Celano’s account, the mother promised to wreathe Francis’s altar with sil-
ver thread and to cover it with a new altar cloth, while Bonaventure mentions only
the altar cloth. This element of the story may intend an altar in a Franciscan church
in Suessa or nearby, but both texts do not specify its identity beyond “the altar of
blessed Francis”, and it is likely that by the end of the thirteenth century this would
have been read to refer to the altar in the Lower Church, see Early Documents 2,
 in loco tutissimo et firmissimo 37

mensa of the high altar had, according to Franciscan tradition, a

miraculous heritage of its own, for it was commonly identified with
the great stone from Constantinople mentioned in the early miracle
collections.131 As the great monolith was being transported overland
from Ancona to Assisi it crushed a labourer, only for Francis to raise
the stone and the man to emerge unharmed.132
Perhaps the most striking correspondence lies between the lost
early fourteenth-century fresco in the apse of the Lower Church and
the later legends of St. Francis standing upright over his tomb, fac-
ing east towards the rising sun with light shining from the Stigmata.
As reconstructed by Elvio Lunghi from Pietralunga’s description, the
central figure of St. Francis on the apse vault was the prototype for
a long iconographic tradition portraying the Saint in the guise of
alter Christus.133 Before the destruction of the apse fresco in 1623,
Francis stood over his tomb, facing east, probably with rays of gold
marking the wounds of Christ on his body.134 This was the image
that pilgrims and friars would have seen as they looked up from
kneeling on the steps before the high altar. Just as the needs of the
tomb and its pilgrims dictated the organisation of the surrounding
frescoes, so the same images could mould the myths through which
the passing public perceived Francis’s enigmatic tomb.

pp. 423, 658. The practice of encircling a tomb with precious metal or wax tapers
is well attested in late medieval miracula collections, see Cannon and Vauchez,
Margherita of Cortona, pp. 57–60 and Cooper, “Qui Perusii”, p. 241. The wreathing
of the altar in the Lower Church would be a further indication of contemporary
votive practices being accommodated by the altar/tomb arrangement of Francis’s
shrine.
131
Gatti, La tomba, p. 106.
132
The story is included amongst the miracles appended to Bonaventure’s Legenda
Maior, see Early Documents 2, pp. 661–662. However, in his Tractatus de miraculis,
Thomas of Celano specified that the stone was for the fountain of St. Francis in
Assisi. This episode is preceded by a similar accident involving an altar mensa in
Sicily, and some conflation of the two miracles may have occurred over time, see
Early Documents 2, pp. 428–429.
133
Elvio Lunghi, “La perduta decorazione trecentesca nell’abside della chiesa
inferiore del S. Francesco ad Assisi”, Collectanea franciscana 66 (1996), pp. 479–510.
The medieval image, which was unfinished in its lower portion, was replaced in
1623 by Cesare Sermei’s Last Judgement.
134
Pietralunga did not specify such rays in his description, but they appear in
the earliest images which reproduce the so-called alter Christus gesture, for example
the representation of St. Francis on the predella of Giotto’s Baroncelli altarpiece,
and consistently thereafter.
 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: REINTERPRETING THE
TRECENTO FRESCO PROGRAMME IN THE LOWER
CHURCH AT ASSISI

Janet Robson

In the twenty-first century, as much as in the fourteenth, the tomb

of Saint Francis is the goal of the pilgrim who enters the Basilica
of San Francesco in Assisi. The body of the Saint has lain beneath
the high altar of the Lower Church since 1230, but the arrange-
ments for pilgrims visiting the shrine have undergone numerous
changes in the interim. The modern pilgrim descends the stairs placed
about halfway down the nave, into a burial crypt where the simple
stone sarcophagus of the Saint, lit by hanging lamps, is exposed to
view within a column of rock. After praying at the small altar placed
before the tomb, the devotee can move freely around its encircling
ambulatory, pausing perhaps at the shrines of four of Francis’s early
companions, planets orbiting the Saint’s star. When the crypt was
opened in the 1820s, it offered the faithful the kind of access to
Francis’s remains that, as Donal Cooper argues elsewhere in this
volume, had never been possible in the medieval period.1
An earlier project to improve lay access to the body of Saint
Francis had been set in motion towards the very end of the thir-
teenth century, when the Lower Church had been substantially
restructured. The initial burial arrangements beneath the high altar
in the Duecento had set up a conflict between the liturgical needs

This article had its beginnings in a series of conference papers presented at the
Courtauld Institute of Art, London; the Leeds International Medieval Congress
2000; and the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo (MI) 2001,
and I am most grateful to all those delegates whose questions and suggestions con-
tributed to its further development. I would like to thank Dr. Joanna Cannon,
whose illuminating work on Margherita of Cortona inspired some of my initial
ideas, for her valuable comments on the draft of this article; and Dr. Donal Cooper,
for many discussions of things Franciscan. This article is dedicated to Peter Sidhom,
pilgrim of St. Francis, who has spent innumerable enjoyable hours walking, talking
and testing theories with me in the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi.
1
See Donal Cooper, “ ‘In loco tutissimo et firmissimo’: the tomb of St. Francis
in history, legend and art,” pp. 1–37.
40 janet robson

of the friars in the choir, which was separated from the nave by a
solid tramezzo screen, and the demands of the devotees of the Saint’s
cult.2 The new arrangements opened up access into the transepts by
demolishing the tramezzo screen, while the space available in the
Lower Church was substantially expanded through the addition of
side chapels (Fig. 1). Francis’s body remained in situ beneath the
high altar, which was now protected and reserved to the friars through
the installation at the top of the altar steps of ironwork cancelli, sep-
arated by marble columns and topped with a cosmati-work archi-
trave. The closest that most Trecento pilgrims could have got to the
body of the Saint would have been to kneel on the steps at the front
of the high altar: a small iron grate set into the top step, facing the
nave, allowed them a limited view down into the subterranean cham-
ber below. This space was known as the buca delle lampade, because
it was lit by oil lamps.3
Although the degree of lay access to the shrine is greater now
than in the Trecento, another change in the pilgrim’s experience of
the tomb is perhaps even more striking. While the austere crypt is
entirely devoid of images, every inch of the barrel vaults and walls
of the transepts, crossing vaults and apse is covered in brightly-
coloured frescoes.4 Nowadays, the religious pilgrims who come to
visit Saint Francis’s tomb are matched by equal numbers of pilgrims
of art, coming to see the paintings. In the Lower Church in the
fourteenth century, there was no such dichotomy: image and cult
were combined into a single devotional experience.
* * *

2
Ibid.
3
This grate still exists in the present-day altar step. A similar grate is shown in
two rather fanciful engravings in P. Ridolfi, OFMConv., Historiarum Seraphicae Religionis
libri tres (Venice, 1586) (see Isidoro Gatti, OFMConv., La Tomba di S. Francesco nei
Secoli (Assisi, 1983), fig. 17) and on an engraving of 1771, but it is likely to be much
older. A useful comparison is the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi, where St. Clare,
like St. Francis, was also interred beneath a high altar protected by ironwork can-
celli. These cancelli (at least part of which are original) are still in place, as is the
small grate in the top step in front of the altar. See Marino Bigaroni, “Origine e
sviluppo storico della chiesa,” in Marino Bigaroni, Hans-Rudolf Meier and Elvio
Lunghi, La Basilica di S. Chiara in Assisi (Ponte San Giovanni, PG, 1994), pp. 24–30,
and the photograph on p. 25 (Santa Chiara). See Cooper (Fig. 9) for the 1771
engraving of San Francesco, and for a fuller argument in support of dating the
arrangement of cancelli and buca delle lampade to the early fourteenth century.
4
The crypt was initially decorated in a neo-Classic style, but was remodelled
between 1925 and 1932 by Ugo Tarchi.
 the pilgrim’s progress 41

The need to improve access to the tomb has been identified as

a key motive behind the Franciscans’ decision to restructure the
Lower Church.5 Despite this, very little attention has been paid to
the manner in which pilgrims experienced the shrine, and virtually
none to the way in which the frescoes may have contributed to that
experience.
The most obvious reason for this lacuna is art historical. Vasari’s
methodology, which made art history the history of the artist, con-
tinues to cast its long shadow. The consequences for the historiog-
raphy of the Lower Church transepts at Assisi cannot, it seems to
me, be overstated. Since the frescoes of the north6 transept and the
crossing vaults are attributed to the workshop of Giotto di Bondone
(or his followers) (Fig. 2), and those of the south transept to Pietro
Lorenzetti (Fig. 3), the two arms of the transepts are most frequently
treated entirely separately, by different scholars (or sometimes even
by the same scholars), especially in the Italian literature.7 This mono-
graphic tendency has been exacerbated by the fact that Giotto and
Pietro Lorenzetti are identified with different regional ‘schools’, so
that one finds the transept decoration divided between studies on
Florentine and on Sienese painting. Of course, in recent decades,
art historical interests in the frescoes of the Lower Church have
broadened considerably from the previous near-exclusive focus on
attribution, style and dating, with far more attention being paid to

5
For example, Elvio Lunghi, The Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi: The Frescoes by
Giotto, his Precursors, and Followers (London, 1996), p. 100; Irene Hueck, “Die Kapellen
der Basilika San Francesco in Assisi: die Auftraggeber und die Franziskaner,” in
Patronage and Public in the Trecento, Proceedings of the St. Lambrecht Symposium, Abtei St.
Lambrecht, Styria, 18–19 July 1984, ed. Vincent Moleta (Florence, 1986), pp. 81–104
(on p. 93).
6
As the Basilica is occidented, I am using geographic rather than liturgical points
of the compass.
7
Apart from the treatment of the frescoes in the many monographs devoted to
Giotto and Pietro Lorenzetti, some examples dealing specifically with the Assisi fres-
coes are: for the north transept, Luciano Bellosi, Giotto at Assisi (Assisi, 1989); Giotto
e i giotteschi in Assisi, introduction Giovanni Palumbo (Rome, 1969); and for the
south transept, Luciano Bellosi, Pietro Lorenzetti at Assisi (Assisi, 1988); C. Brandi,
Pietro Lorenzetti: Gli affreschi nella Basilica Inferiore di Assisi (Milan, 1957); Hayden B.J.
Maginnis, “Pietro Lorenzetti and the Assisi Passion Cycle,” Ph.D dissertation,
Princeton University, 1975 and “The Passion Cycle in the Lower Church of San
Francesco, Assisi: the technical evidence,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 39 (1976),
193–208; Carlo Volpe, Pietro Lorenzetti ad Assisi (Milan, 1965). Even books on the
complete Basilica tend to compartmentalise the material by artist: see, for example,
L. Colletti, Gli affreschi della Basilica di Assisi (Bergamo, 1949); Lunghi, The Basilica.
42 janet robson

iconography, patronage, and viewership.8 But while modern icono-

graphic treatments have immensely increased our understanding of
the relationships between Franciscan art and the spirituality, theol-
ogy and politics of the Order, they naturally tend to focus on par-
ticular iconographies, rather than on the sanctuary decoration as a
whole. So studies that look at the Lower Church transepts as a
unified space are still rare.9
In the search for a more holistic approach to the frescoes, the
north transept seems more problematic than the south. It contains
two separate narrative cycles, the Infancy of Christ and a short series
of Miracles of St. Francis, as well as two unconnected frescoes (the
Crucifixion and an earlier Madonna and Child Enthroned). As a result,
the programme appears somewhat piecemeal, and certainly less unified
than that of the south transept, whose narrative scenes are devoted
entirely (but for the insertion of the Stigmatisation of St. Francis) to a
Passion Cycle.

8
For the south transept: Maginnis, “Pietro Lorenzetti and the Assisi Passion
Cycle”; Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting,
Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge, 1996); Janet Robson, “Judas and the
Franciscans: perfidy pictured in the Lorenzetti Passion Cycle at Assisi,” Art Bulletin
86, no. 1 (2004), 31–57. On the vele and apse: D.W. Schönau, “The ‘vele’ of Assisi:
their position and influence,” Mededelingen van het Nederlands Instituut te Rome 44–45,
n.s. 9–10 (1983), 99–109; Elvio Lunghi, “La perduta decorazione trecentesca nel-
l’abside della chiesa inferiore del S. Francesco ad Assisi,” Collectanea Franciscana 66
(1996), 479–510 and “L’influenza di Ubertino da Casale e di Pietro di Giovanni
Olivi nel programma iconografico della chiesa inferiore del S. Francesco ad Assisi,”
ibid., 67 (1997), 167–87. The relationship between the Franciscans and private
patrons in determining iconography has, not surprisingly, focused on the side chapels.
See Hueck, “Die Kapellen” and, for the St. Nicholas Chapel, “Il Cardinale Napoleone
Orsini e la cappella di S. Nicola nella Basilica Francescana ad Assisi,” in Roma Anno
1300: Atti della IV settimana di studi di storia dell’arte medievale dell’Università di Roma ‘La
Sapienza’ (19–24 maggio 1980) (Rome, 1983), pp. 187–98; for the Magdalen Chapel,
see Lorraine Schwartz, “The fresco decoration of the Magdalen Chapel in the
Basilica at Assisi,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1980, and “Patronage and
Franciscan iconography in the Magdalen Chapel at Assisi,” Burlington Magazine 133
(1991), 32–36; for the St. Martin Chapel, see Joel Brink, “Saints Martin and Francis:
sources and meaning in Simone Martini’s Montefiore Chapel,” in Renaissance Studies
in Honor of Hugh Craig Smyth 2, ed. Andrew Morrogh et al (Florence, 1985), pp.
79–96; Adrian S. Hoch, “St. Martin of Tours: his transformation into a chivalric
hero and Franciscan ideal,” Zeitschrift für Künstgeschichte 50 (1987), 471–82.
9
Two notable examples are Gerhard Ruf, OFMConv., Das Grab des heiligen
Franziskus. Die Fresken der Unterkirche von Assisi (Basel, 1981) and Guy Lobrichon, Assise:
les fresques de la basilique inférieure (Paris, 1985).
 the pilgrim’s progress 43

Yet despite these apparent differences, and the change of artist,

there are good reasons for believing that the entire sanctuary was
planned from the beginning as a single, coherent decorative pro-
gramme, carried out during the first two decades of the Trecento.
The east and west walls of both transept arms are divided into the
same number of pictorial fields, of the same shape and size (with
the single exception of the Lorenzetti Crucifixion, which takes up the
equivalent of four scenes). The narratives on these walls are arranged
in three tiers, with two scenes to a tier, while the end wall of each
transept is divided into two tiers, with two images on each. All the
narrative scenes are divided by broad ornamental friezes, contain-
ing painted busts of figures placed in geometric lozenges. Similar
friezes are also used on the ribs of the crossing vaults.
Further, the decorative programme originally included the tribune
of the apse, and seems to have been planned to encompass the nave
as well. The apse was painted at the same time as the crossing vault,
by the Giotto shop, but was left incomplete.10 In 1623 it was over-
painted with a Last Judgment by Cesare Sermei. The loss of this cen-
tral image leaves a hole in the programme, but we can at least form
some idea of its appearance from the description made by the
Franciscan Fra Ludovico da Pietralunga, ca. 1570.11
Much more difficult to assess is the hypothetical decoration of the
nave, since this was never realized. The extant frescoes, attributed
to the St. Francis Master, are dated to the 1260s.12 They juxtapose
scenes from the Passion of Christ on the north wall with scenes from
the life of St. Francis on the south. The decision was evidently taken
to sacrifice these frescoes to the building of the new side chapels,
which open off the nave, and they have remained half-demolished
ever since. Given the effort expended on the new decorations in the
sanctuary, it seems inherently unlikely that the Franciscans intended
to leave the nave in this state. Several scholars have noted that the
subjects of the narrative cycles in the transepts are linked to the

10
Lunghi, The Basilica, pp. 116–17, suggests the work may have come to a forced
halt in summer 1311, because of a flood in the Lower Church.
11
Fra’ Ludovico da Pietralunga: descrizione della Basilica di S. Francesco e di altri santu-
ari di Assisi, ed. Pietro Scarpellini (Treviso, 1982), pp. 62–64 (hereafter cited as Fra’
Ludovico).
12
Joanna Cannon, “Dating the frescoes by the Maestro di San Francesco at
Assisi,” Burlington Magazine 134 (1982), 65–69.
44 janet robson

themes established in the allegories of Chastity, Obedience and Poverty

in the adjacent crossing vaults.13 Hence, the Infancy of Christ is asso-
ciated with Chastity, in the north web of the vault, and the Passion
with Obedience, in the south. It is therefore reasonable to assume
that the decoration of the nave would have been linked to Poverty,
the allegory in the east web.
Technical evidence has shown that the transepts were painted from
north to south, and that the Lorenzetti Passion Cycle was therefore
the last part to have been painted.14 Hayden Maginnis has argued
for a terminus ante quem of 1320, both on style grounds and because,
after the Ghibelline uprising of 29 September 1319, Assisi in the
1320s and 1330s was beset by political and financial problems.15 But,
in addition, any plan to celebrate either Franciscan or Christological
poverty in the nave frescoes would have been fatally undermined by
the declaration of Pope John XXII, in 1323, that the doctrine of
the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles was heretical.16
* * *
If we accept that the Trecento decoration of the sanctuary of the
Lower Church was devised as a coherent programme, what evidence
is there that this programme was intended for an audience of pil-
grims? Since the area around the tomb was deliberately opened up
and then immediately redecorated, common sense suggests that it
would have been highly unlikely that the devisors of the programme
would not have considered pilgrims as important viewers of the new
frescoes. But the situation is complicated by the fact that the sanc-
tuary continued to serve a dual function and to be used by the friars
for liturgical purposes.

13
For instance, A.T. Mignosi, “Osservazioni sul transetto della basilica inferiore
di Assisi,” Bollettino d’arte 60 (1975), 129–42; Lobrichon, Assise, p. 101; Lunghi, The
Basilica, pp. 106–111.
14
Hayden B.J. Maginnis, “The Passion Cycle in the Lower Church of San
Francesco” (see above, n. 7) and “Assisi revisited: notes on recent observations,”
Burlington Magazine 117 (1975), 511–15; Robin Simon, “Towards a relative chronology
of the frescoes in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi,” Burlington Magazine
118 (1976), 361–65.
15
Hayden B.J. Maginnis, “Pietro Lorenzetti: a chronology,” Art Bulletin 66 (1984),
183–211 (on p. 208).
16
Lunghi, The Basilica, p. 111. The abandonment of the plan seems to have been
tacitly acknowledged by the attempt to patch up the surviving section of St. Francis
Preaching to the Birds, in a style similar to that of the Upper Church St. Francis Cycle.
 the pilgrim’s progress 45

In many ways, the programme could comfortably serve two audi-

ences. The Infancy and Passion Cycles that take up most of the wall
space in the transept arms could certainly have been viewed and
understood by both lay and religious, Franciscan or not, albeit on
rather different levels. For instance, I have argued elsewhere that the
unusual attention given to Judas in the first five scenes of the Lorenzetti
Passion Cycle was devised for the audience of friars, and had specific
meaning for them.17 Judas’s fall was linked to his avarice: as Bona-
venture put it, “none of Christ’s disciples were lost except the one
who carried [the purse].”18 This was of especial interest to an Order
whose particular practice of poverty was founded on the doctrine of
the absolute poverty of Christ and the Apostles.19 Not only that, but
the logical corollary of the creation of Francis as alter Christus was the
realisation that one of the Saint’s companions must have betrayed
him. The alter Iudas role was filled by one Brother John of Cappella,
who had apostatized from the Order and subsequently hanged him-
self. Arnald of Sarrant, after telling John of Cappella’s sorry tale,
warned his brothers: “Whoever sees this happen to such a chosen
companion should watch out if he is standing, lest he fall more
severely.”20 Hence the Suicide of Judas in the Lorenzetti Passion Cycle
would have been a perpetual reminder to the friars of the dangers
of falling from grace. But such an interpretation would not have pre-
cluded a more general reading of the Judas scenes by different types
of viewers. Likewise, although the positioning of the two Crucifixions
on the east wall of each transept arm (only one of which is placed
in its narrative sequence) was probably dictated by the presence of
the friars, the popularity of Passion devotion in the period would
have made the images much more broadly applicable.21 Some parts

17
For the following, see Robson, “Judas and the Franciscans” (see above, n. 8).
18
Bonaventure, Defense of the Mendicants, The Works of Bonaventure 4, trans. José de
Vinck (Paterson, NJ, 1965), chap. 7, p. 159.
19
The official Franciscan position on this was most fully expounded by Bonaventure
in his Apologia pauperum of ca. 1260. (Trans. as Defense of the Mendicants, ibid.)
20
Arnald of Sarrant, The Kinship of St. Francis, trans. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents
3, eds. Regis J. Armstrong OFMCap., J.A. Wayne Hellmann OFMConv., William
J. Short OFM (New York, 2001), p. 693.
21
These Crucifixions are placed directly beneath two earlier Crucifixions, attributed
to Cimabue, in the equivalent positions in the transepts of the Upper Church.
Because of later alterations to the Lower Church and crypt, an exact reconstruc-
tion of the fourteenth-century choir is problematic. Lunghi, “L’influenza di Ubertino,”
pp. 186–87, seems to assume a gathering of friars under the vele, within the high
46 janet robson

of the programme, however, do seem to have been devised more

exclusively for the friars. This is especially true of the vele: the iconog-
raphy of the three Franciscan vows, the complex allegorical imagery,
and the placement of the images directly above the high altar, an
area reserved for the friars, all point to this.
On the other hand, I would argue that some images in the transepts,
while resonant for the friars as well, were aimed more particularly
at pilgrims. Principal among these is the short cycle of posthumous
miracles of St. Francis in the north transept. I will discuss this cycle
in detail below, but for now I would simply highlight the consider-
able body of evidence pointing to the fundamental importance of
the depiction of posthumous miracles in the promotion of the cults
of saints and beati in this period.22 Another image I believe may have
been primarily devised for visitors to the church was the Glorification
of St. Francis (Fig. 4) in the west web of the crossing vault. Although
still an allegory, this image is somewhat different in nature from the
Franciscan vows in the other vele, and its fundamental message would

altar enclosure itself. I am hypothesizing that for divine offices the friars would have
been seated in the apse, facing (geographic) east. For further discussion, see Cooper,
note 106.
22
In the preliminary notes to Images of St. Francis of Assisi in Painting, Stone and
Glass from the Earliest Images to ca. 1320 in Italy: a Catalogue (Florence, 1999), William
R. Cook argues that the early dossals of St. Francis “with their emphasis on the
posthumous miracles that took place at Francis’ tomb, encouraged pilgrimage to
Assisi” (p. 22). All seven surviving dossals of St. Francis painted before 1263 (accord-
ing to Cook’s dating) feature posthumous miracles: only two contain more life than
posthumous miracles, while three contain solely posthumous miracles: see cat. nos.
27, 68, 115, 141, 143, 145 and 163. F. Bisogni has argued that the division of con-
tent in the frescoes in the Cappellone di S. Nicola da Tolentino, which have been
connected with the Saint’s canonisation process of 1325, reflects an expected dual
audience, with the scenes of Nicholas’s life being directly primarily at the Augustinian
friars and the miracle scenes at pilgrims. See F. Bisogni, “Gli inizi dell’iconografia
di Nicola da Tolentino e gli affreschi del Cappellone,” in San Nicola, Tolentino, le
Marche: Contributi e ricerche sul processo (a. 1325) per la canonizzione di San Nicola da
Tolentino. Convegno internazionale di studi, Tolentino 4–7 sett. 1985 (Tolentino, 1987), pp.
266–321. Joanna Cannon argues that the emphasis on Beata Margherita as a thau-
maturge in the lost fresco cycle in S. Margherita, Cortona, ca. 1335, was connected
with renewed civic interest in seeking her official canonisation: see Joanna Cannon
and André Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of
a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, PA, 1999), pp. 181–90, 205–12
and 217–20. See also Max Seidel, “Condizionamento iconografico e scelta seman-
tica: Simone Martini e la tavola del Beato Agostino Novello,” in Simone Martini: Atti
del convegno, Siena, 1985, ed. Luciano Bellosi (Florence, 1988), pp. 75–80, for the
role of the posthumous miracle scenes of the Beato Agostino altarpiece in the pro-
motion of the Beato’s cult in Siena in the early 1330s.
 the pilgrim’s progress 47

not have been difficult to understand. Most importantly, it is posi-

tioned above the tomb and would have been facing the pilgrims as
they knelt on the altar steps.
At this point, it would be pertinent to assess these images through
the eyes of the pilgrims themselves. Unfortunately, pilgrim accounts
of visits to Assisi in the period up to the definitive closure of the
tomb chamber in 1476 offer meagre pickings.23 The Spanish trav-
eller Pero Tafur visited Assisi in the 1430s and commented on the
tomb, but otherwise added only the briefest of remarks: “The monastery
is very notable and very richly adorned.”24 The inveterate English
pilgrim, Margery Kempe, visited Assisi on her way to Rome in the
summer of 1414. In the church she was shown a relic of the Virgin’s
veil, whereupon “sche wept, sche sobbyd, sche cryed wyth gret plente
of teerys and many holy thowtys.”25 While the paltriness of the evi-
dence is disappointing, it should not necessarily be seen as proof that
the shrine and its images had no impact on pilgrims. More likely it
reflects the fact that most pilgrims simply had no reason to record
their experiences. Ben Nilson, encountering a similar lack of evi-
dence for medieval English shrines, comments: “The medieval view
seems to have been that everyone knew what happened at a shrine,
and therefore it needed no description.”26
What we can glean from the accounts of Pero Tafur and Margery
Kempe is that both had close contact with the friars. Margery met
and talked with an English Franciscan friar in Assisi.27 Tafur lodged
for three days in “the principal monastery” of the Order (presum-
ably the Sacro Convento), where he found “a servant of our Cardinal
of Castile who was a great friend of mine”.28 Tafur was presumably

23
I have not undertaken extensive research on this particular point and there
may be accounts that are presently unknown to me.
24
Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures 1435–39, trans. and ed. Malcolm Letts (London,
1926), p. 44.
25
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow, 2000), pp. 180–81.
The relic of the Virgin’s veil had been presented to the friars of the Sacro Convento
by Tommaso Orsini that same year: Silvestro Nessi, La Basilica di S.Francesco in Assisi
e la sua documentazione storico 2, 2nd rev. ed. (Assisi, 1994), p. 395. Margery’s tearful
reaction to the veil was a common one for her, but the often hostile reactions of
other pilgrims towards her, recorded in her Book, suggest that it was not regarded
as typical pilgrim behaviour.
26
Ben Nilson, “The Medieval Experience at the Shrine,” in Pilgrimage Explored,
ed. J. Stopford (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1999), pp. 95–122 (on p. 97).
27
The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 180.
28
Tafur, Travels and Adventures, p. 44.
48 janet robson

referring to the friars when he reported: “they say that the body [of
St. Francis] . . . is buried there in a place which they show . . .”29 It
is notable that both Tafur and Margery were able to find friars of
their own nationality to guide them. An account of a local pilgrim-
age to Assisi is given in the Memorial of the mystic Angela of Foligno.
Although the events related took place in 1291, before the restruc-
turing of the Lower Church, the Memorial gives some insight into
the general nature of such a pilgrimage. Angela made her pilgrimage
as part of a group of “very good men and women, her companions”30
and in the church she met a friar from her home town who was
her relative, confessor and spiritual advisor, and who later became
her scribe.31 This is the only pilgrimage account of the period to
refer to a specific image: on entering the Upper Church, Angela saw
“Saint Francis depicted in the arms of Christ” (in the stained-glass
window now in the first bay of the south wall of the nave), trig-
gering a violent spiritual crisis that caused her to screech long and
loud, much to the embarrassment of her confessor.32
While the collective accounts of Tafur, Margery and Angela sug-
gest that the friars were actively involved in guiding visitors around
the Basilica, they do not provide evidence for a coherent decorative
programme aimed at pilgrims visiting the tomb. However, the case
for such a programme is supported by evidence of a different kind:
the images themselves.
In the rest of this article, I will argue that there is a consistent
message running through the images of the entire area around the
tomb. The artists employ two visual tools to express some overar-
ching themes that are able to transcend the individual meanings
communicated through the iconography of the separate narrative
cycles. First, specific gestures are used repeatedly to help pilgrims
interpret the images (perhaps with the assistance of a guide) with-
out needing detailed knowledge of learned religious texts. Although
I will draw on some Franciscan writings, this is primarily in order
to provide support for my arguments for the benefit of the modern
reader; in addition, as far as possible, I have deliberately used only
the most popular texts of St. Bonaventure.

29
Ibid.
30
Angela of Foligno, Memorial, trans. John Cirignano, introduction, notes and
interpretive essay by Cristina Mazzoni (Cambridge, 1999), p. 37.
31
His identity is unknown, but he is usually referred to as Brother A.
32
Angela of Foligno, Memorial, p. 43, for Angela’s account of the incident and
p. 37 for Brother A’s side of the story.
 the pilgrim’s progress 49

The second tool is the positioning of the images in relation to

each other and within the sacred space. I will argue that the sequence
in which images were viewed by the pilgrims as they moved around
the church would have significantly affected the overall message
received. The route which pilgrims took around the church would
therefore have formed an important component of the programme.
Before discussing the pilgrim’s progress in detail, I should like to add
some provisos. I do not intend to suggest that my proposed route
would have been used exclusively, or at all times. I am thinking pri-
marily in terms of times of day when Mass or the offices were not
taking place (so no friars in the choir), and of periods of the year
when the church would have been at its most crowded. Peak periods
would have been mainly the feasts on which pilgrims visiting the
church could gain indulgences.33 In constructing my route I have
had to make two suppositions. The first is that pilgrims would have
venerated the tomb from the steps at the front of the high altar
(rather than the back). The position of the buca delle lampade is evi-
dence in favour of this argument.34 The second is that it would have
been possible for pilgrims to circulate around the transept area by
passing behind the altar.35 Although both these assertions are to some
extent hostages to fortune, I would argue that the visual evidence I
shall cite is at least suggestive of their probability.
* * *

33
An indulgence of one year and forty days was offered to those visiting the
Basilica on the feasts (and octaves) of St. Francis (4 October), the Translation of
St. Francis (25 May) and St. Anthony of Padua (13 June); Pentecost, the Nativity,
the Annunciation, the Purification of the Virgin and the Assumption. See Bullarium
Franciscanum Romanorum Pontificum constitutiones, epistolas, ac diplomata continens tribus
Ordinibus Minorum, Clarissarum et Poenitentium a Seraphico Patriarca Sancto Francisco insti-
tutis concessa 4 (Rome, 1768), ed. J.H. Sbaralea, p. 380 (Boniface VIII, Ante thronum,
21 January 1296) and pp. 254–55 (Nicholas IV, Eximae devotionis, 1 June 1291). A
lesser indulgence of 100 days was available for those visiting the Basilica on all
other days of the year (“diebus singulis”), ibid., p. 380 (Boniface VIII, Licet is, 21
January 1296). Most attractive of all was the plenary indulgence known as the
Perdono (2 August): although it applied not to the Basilica but to the Porziuncola at
Santa Maria degli Angeli, many pilgrims would also have taken the opportunity to
visit the tomb of St. Francis while they were in Assisi. Margery Kempe did so. For
the historicity of the Perdono, see P. Rino Bartolini OFM, “La ‘novitas’ dell’indul-
genza della Porziuncola alla luce del IV Concilio Lateranse e della storia dei pel-
legrinaggi,” Convivium Assisiense, n.s., anno 4, no. 1 (2002), 195–264.
34
See note 3.
35
The main uncertainty here is the position and extent of the friars’ choir. See
note 21.
50 janet robson

The construction of the side chapels along the north side, with their
interconnecting doorways, created an additional route between the
atrium and the north transept (Fig. 1). This immediately suggests
two alternative circular routes. The first possibility is that the pil-
grims processed up the nave to the high altar, where they would
kneel above the tomb, then continue on their way, passing behind
the altar (in a clockwise direction) before returning to the entrance
via the side chapels. The obvious benefit of this route is its direct-
ness: the pilgrim immediately achieves his or her object. But there
are distinct disadvantages in terms of crowd control. A long line of
the faithful could quickly build up behind those kneeling at the high
altar, with nothing to keep them occupied.
The second possible route simply reverses the first. The pilgrims
approach through the side chapels, whose altars might provide con-
venient stopping points on the way to the tomb. Moving around the
transepts in a counter-clockwise direction, the pilgrims would be able
to venerate the relics of two groups of Francis’s early companions.
The first wall-shrine, in the north transept, is still in its Trecento
position beneath the Madonna and Child Enthroned attributed to Cimabue.
Fronted by an iron grating, the shrine contains the remains of five
friars who are depicted in the fresco above.36 There was originally
a similar arrangement for the second shrine, beneath the Crucifixion
in the south transept.37 It might be argued that the pilgrim could
venerate these shrines equally well by taking the first route. But there
is one crucial difference: this way, the pilgrim venerates the relics of
the companions before reaching the tomb of the Saint. As well as the
crowd control advantages, there are also psychological benefits. The
pilgrim’s devotional experience is extended along with the anticipa-
tion of achieving his or her main object. The Saint’s tomb becomes
the culminating experience of the tour.38

36
In his description, Fra Ludovico da Pietralunga noted the presence of a little
panel alongside the shrine giving some details about the beati. This panel (now lost)
identified them as Bernard of Quintavalle, Sylvester of Assisi, William of England,
Eletto of Assisi (a layman) and Valentine of Narni. Scarpellini, however, points out
that the last friar could not have been Valentine of Narni since he did not die until
1378. See Fra’ Ludovico (see above, n. 11), pp. 71–72.
37
According to Fra’ Ludovico, p. 76, whose description was made before the fres-
coes were damaged by the construction of a Baroque altarpiece, this shrine con-
tained the remains of Brothers Leo, Angelo, Masseo and Rufino. These are the
four companions who are now interred in the crypt along with St. Francis.
38
That the Franciscans of the Sacro Convento considered the proper role of the
 the pilgrim’s progress 51

The arrangement of the narrative cycles within the transepts rein-

forces the likelihood that the circulatory route was planned in this
way, since the Infancy Cycle is in the north transept and the Passion
Cycle in the south. Lobrichon notes that the entire Christological
scheme begins with the two halves of the Annunciation on the upper
register of the end wall of the north transept and concludes with the
Harrowing of Hell and the Resurrection, which face them on the wall
opposite. The disposition of the narratives within the sacred space
directs the spectator’s movement: “one passes therefore from north
to south, from the Promise to the Accomplishment.”39
All these considerations convince me that pilgrims were always
intended to move around the transepts in a counter-clockwise direc-
tion: therefore they must have entered the north transept through
the small doorway from the Magdalen Chapel. Irene Hueck has
argued that the friars had the chapels on the north side erected in
quick succession in the early years of the fourteenth century, and
that the need to ease circulation problems was the prime motive for
their creation, with the demand from private patrons for burial space
being only a secondary consideration.40
Further, she suggests that it may have been the Franciscans rather
than the patrons who selected many of the dedications for the new
altars. The St. Anthony of Padua Chapel did not acquire a patron
until the middle of the fourteenth century, when the arms of the
Lelli family were placed on the wall, and its altar may have replaced
one that had previously stood in front of the Cimabue Madonna and
Child Enthroned in the north transept.41
The evidence for the Magdalen Chapel is particularly interesting.
The patron of the chapel has been identified as Teobaldo Pontano,
the Franciscan Bishop of Assisi from 1296 to his death in 1329.42 A

relics of the companions to be suitably subordinate to those of St. Francis is demon-

strated in a story in the Chronica XXIV Generalium ordinis minorum, Analecta Francescana
3 (Quaracchi, 1897), p. 217. During his minister-generalate (1233–39), Elias of
Cortona proceeds to the tomb of Brother William of England and admonishes him
not to obscure the glory of the Saint with his miracles.
39
Lobrichon, Assise, p. 101.
40
Hueck, “Die Kapellen”.
41
Ibid., p. 96.
42
The two donor portraits in the chapel and an identification of Cardinal Pietro
di Barro, who died in 1252, as the patron have confused the situation. Simon,
“Towards a relative chronology” (see above, n. 14), has argued that the Magdalen
Chapel was built between 1256 and 1274, but Hueck’s dating of shortly after 1300
is more generally accepted.
52 janet robson

papal letter of 1332 names him as the patron and says that he paid
600 gold florins for the chapel. But Hueck has shown that Pontano
initially put down only 100 florins, the rest of the sum being advanced
by the Franciscans themselves.43 By the time of his death, the Bishop
had still not paid back all of the loan. Hueck argues that the chapel
must already have been built before Pontano became its patron, and
its stained-glass window commissioned.44 While the windows of the
other private chapels contain either a portrait or the coat-of-arms of
the patron, this one does not.45 Since the window contains scenes
from the life of the Magdalen, this suggests that the Franciscans had
already chosen the dedication for the chapel’s altar. Hueck believes
that it may have replaced an earlier Magdalen altar that had been
situated on the lay side of the tramezzo screen. Some of the marble
cosmati-work panels from the tramezzo were also incorporated into
the Magdalen Chapel, perhaps for the same reason.
The unusual inclusion of two portraits of the patron in the chapel
is suggestive of strong personal input by Bishop Pontano, yet the
distinctions that are being made in these two images are telling.
Whereas Pontano kneels at the feet of San Rufino (titular of his
cathedral) in full episcopal pomp as Bishop of Assisi, it is as a
Franciscan friar that he grasps the hand of the Magdalen. The per-
sonal interests of Pontano seem in perfect rapport here with the cor-
porate interests of the Franciscans of the Sacro Convento. The
importance of the Magdalen in mendicant spirituality is well known.
Katherine Jansen has argued convincingly that the twin factors of
mendicant preaching and the reformulation of sacramental penance
at the Fourth Lateran Council inspired a new wave of devotion to
the Magdalen in late medieval Italy, and that she was offered to the
laity as a model of perfect penance.46 It is in her role as a penitent
that she earns her place at the foot of the Cross in late medieval
depictions of the Crucifixion—so it is significant that the first time she

43
Irene Hueck, “Ein Dokument zur Magdalenenkapelle der Franziskuskirche von
Assisi,” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini (Florence, 1984), pp. 191–96.
44
Frank Martin, Die Glasmalereien von San Francesco in Assisi (Regensburg, 1997),
pp. 297–303, dates the window ca. 1300–05, making it the earliest window in the
chapels of the north side.
45
Hueck, “Die Kapellen”, p. 94.
46
Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular
Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 1999).
 the pilgrim’s progress 53

is permitted to displace St. Francis from this position among the

numerous Crucifixions in the Basilica at Assisi is in the north transept
of the Lower Church (Fig. 5).47
The Magdalen Chapel stands out from the other chapels on the
north side because it is the only one to have been decorated in the
early Trecento.48 The St. Louis of Toulouse Chapel was frescoed by
Dono Doni in 1573 and the St. Anthony of Padua Chapel by Cesare
Sermei and Girolamo Martelli in 1609.49 The failure to decorate all
the new chapels—and to repaint the nave—was probably due to the
straitened financial circumstances of the Basilica from the 1320s and
a dearth of private patronage. Be that as it may, the eagerness of
the friars to complete the decoration of the Magdalen Chapel, for-
warding much of the money on the patron’s behalf, might suggest
that they considered this chapel an essential component of the over-
all iconographic programme of the sanctuary. In addition to Hueck’s
evidence about the choice of dedication, it may be significant that
the frescoes were undertaken at the same time, and by the same
group of artists, as the decoration of the north transept.50
Rather than proceeding through all the chapels, might the main
pilgrim route have been up the nave, then turning right into the
Magdalen Chapel (see Fig. 1)? In the absence of the nave decora-
tions that would have completed the overall decorative programme,
this idea must remain speculative, but it should at least be consid-
ered as a possibility, if only as an amendment to the original plan.

47
In both Crucifixion frescoes in the Upper Church transepts, attributed to Cimabue,
St. Francis is at the foot of the Cross. See Ketti Neil, “St. Francis of Assisi, the
Penitent Magdalen and the patron at the foot of the Cross,” Rutgers Art Review 9–10
(1988–89), 83–110; Bridget Heal, “Paradigm of penance: the presence of Mary
Magdalen at the foot of the Cross in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Crucifixion
imagery from Tuscany and Umbria,” MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art,
University of London, 1996.
48
There are some fragmentary frescoes attributed to Andrea de’ Bartoli ca. 1360
in the small San Lorenzo Chapel, between the chapels of the Magdalen and St.
Anthony of Padua.
49
It is possible that these decorations might have replaced earlier schemes.
However, Fra’ Ludovico does not mention frescoes in either chapel in his description
of ca. 1570 (pp. 41–42 and 45). See also Nessi, La Basilica 2 (see above, n. 25),
pp. 448–54.
50
See Schwartz, “The fresco decoration of the Magdalen Chapel” (see above,
n. 8), pp. 121–53, and, for a more recent review of the historiography, Scarpellini’s
comments in Fra’ Ludovico, pp. 244–50.
54 janet robson

The preaching of penitence had been central to the Franciscan

mission from the very beginning and it is the overriding message of
the iconography of the Magdalen Chapel.51 If the pilgrims did indeed
enter the chapel from the nave, the theme would have been intro-
duced by the series of full-length figures of saints who are paired
under the entrance arch (Fig. 6). Some of these are extremely unusual
choices: for instance, the Good Thief and the Roman centurion
Longinus (paired here) are very rarely depicted outside their narra-
tive context in the Crucifixion. The theme linking all the saints in the
soffit is penitence and this, in turn, links them with the Magdalen.
This idea was put forward by Schwartz52 and further developed by
Jansen,53 but neither noted that all five of the male New Testament
figures in the soffit are cited as exemplars of penance by Bonaventure:
Know you not that many of the saints have sinned, and have also
learned from their grievous misdeeds to have pity on us sinners? . . .
Remember always that they obtained pardon through their prayers. . . .
Behold Matthew sitting at the counting table, a sinner and a tax col-
lector, and yet chosen as a disciple; Paul stoning Stephen, and yet
called to be an apostle; Peter denying Christ, and yet immediately par-
doned; the soldier crucifying Christ, and yet daring to rely on divine
mercy; the robber hanging on the cross, and yet obtaining pardon.
Finally, O soul, consider that most notorious and wicked sinner Mary
Magdalen becoming so specially devoted to Christ.54
Penitence was a central theme of the Franciscan message to the laity
in general, but it was also of particular relevance to pilgrims, hav-
ing long been a traditional aspect of medieval pilgrimage. The stan-
dard wording of the papal indulgences granted to those visiting the
Basilica specified that the devotee must be “vere poenitentibus et
confessis”.55 It may have been because of the perceived link of pen-

51
When Pope Innocent III approved the Franciscan Order in 1209 or 1210 he
gave the friars, most of whom were laymen, permission to preach, provided that
they preached only penance (1 Celano, chap. 13, par. 33).
52
Schwartz, “Patronage and Franciscan iconography” (see above, n. 8), pp. 32–36.
53
Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, p. 204.
54
Soliloquy on the Four Spiritual Exercises, in The Works of Bonaventure 3, pp. 33–130
(on pp. 61–62). Of the three other male figures depicted in the soffit, King David
is cited by Bonaventure in this same text, among the Old Testament penitents. The
identification of the final two figures has proved difficult: Schwartz believes they
are Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Augustine. As a converted Manichean and
the author of the Confessions, St. Augustine might be viewed as a penitent, but it is
hard to see how Dionysius could be.
55
For references, see note 33.
 the pilgrim’s progress 55

itence that at Santiago de Compostela, according to the famous

description of the church in the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus,
“between the altar of Saint James and the altar of the Holy Saviour
is the altar of St. Mary Magdalene, where the morning masses for
the pilgrims are sung.”56 One wonders whether the Magdalen Chapel
at Assisi might, at times, have served a similar function?57 The chapel
would certainly have been a highly suitable gathering point for pil-
grims waiting to enter the transepts. While they were there, a par-
ticularly apt scene for them to contemplate would have been the
seascape depicted on the right-hand wall (Fig. 7).58 According to the
Golden Legend, fourteen years after Christ’s Ascension the Magdalen
and her companions sailed to Marseilles, and this is shown in the
background of the scene. The foreground, however, contains a sep-
arate and subsequent story.59 Having been converted by the Magdalen,
the governor of Marseilles and his wife set sail on a pilgrimage to
Rome and Jerusalem. But during the voyage the wife dies in child-
birth, and so her husband (called Pilgrim in the Golden Legend ) puts
ashore on a rocky coastline, where he leaves her body, and the baby,
lying on his cloak. In Rome, St. Peter promises Pilgrim that it is
within God’s power “to restore what was taken away, and to turn
your grief into joy.”60 Returning to the same coast on his way home
two years later, Pilgrim discovers his child miraculously still alive.
When he invokes the aid of the Magdalen his wife awakens and tells
him that in her dreams, with the Magdalen as her guide, she has
been accompanying her husband throughout his entire pilgrimage.
In the fresco, we see Pilgrim arriving in his little skiff and reaching

56
The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: a Critical Edition, gen. ed. Paula
Gerson, 2 vols. (London, 1998), Vol II: The Text. Annotated English Translation by Paula
Gerson, Annie Shaver-Crandell and Alison Stones, p. 79. The altar was apparently
prominently placed in the ambulatory, directly behind the high altar: p. 210, note
106.
57
Bishop Pontano’s donation for the chapel included provision for vestments, a
chalice, two silver candlesticks and a missal. See Hueck, “Ein Dokument” (see above,
n. 43), p. 196.
58
See Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita (see above, n. 22), p. 178, for the sug-
gestion that the frescoes on the south nave wall of S. Margherita in Cortona may
have provided a rallying point for pilgrims waiting, on busy days, to approach the
beata’s tomb on the opposite wall.
59
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, Readings on the Saints 1, trans. William
Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 376–79.
60
Ibid., p. 379.
56 janet robson

out for his child (whose figure is now largely effaced), while his wife
still lies motionless on his cloak.
The iconography of the Magdalen Chapel frescoes thus introduces
a theme of Hope that is continued throughout the sanctuary. The
narrative sequence moves from the bottom of the wall to the top
and, as a result, the first two scenes of the cycle are placed directly
above the door leading into the north transept (Fig. 6). The first
scene, Christ in the House of Simon, depicts the Magdalen’s penitence.
As Christ dines in Bethany, the Magdalen (a notorious sinner, accord-
ing to Luke) kneels and anoints his feet with precious ointment and
in return receives forgiveness of her sins. In the second scene, the
Raising of Lazarus, which was understood to prefigure Christ’s own
Resurrection, Lazarus is restored to life by Christ in response to the
pleading of his sisters Mary and Martha.
In both scenes, the Magdalen places all her hope in Christ and
is rewarded. Hope, one of the three theological virtues, had been
defined by Peter Lombard as “the certain expectation of future bliss,
coming out of the grace of God and out of previous merit.”61 The
two scenes pair the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the
body. Professed successively in the Nicene Creed, these are perhaps
the two most important “expectations of future bliss” in which all
true Christians must place their hope.
After taking in these two scenes, the pilgrims could file down the
short passage and through the door into the north transept. From
this direction, the patchwork impression of the lowest tier of images
resolves itself. The short cycle of St. Francis’s posthumous miracles,
instead of seeming a piecemeal addition to the Infancy Cycle, now
assumes much greater prominence. The first images to confront the
pilgrim are the two frescoes opposite, on the lowest tier. The alle-
gory of Francis and Death (Fig. 8), placed over the stairs, must have
been devised especially for this setting, close to the tomb of the
Saint.62 Francis faces forward, looking directly at the viewer, and
holds up his right hand to display his wounded palm. His left hand

61
“[Spes] est certa exspectatio futurae beatitudinis, veniens ex Dei gratia et meritis
praecedentibus,” Magistri Petri Lombardi, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae 2 (Grottaferrata,
1981), lib. III, d. 26, cap. 1 (91), p. 159.
62
The only other version of Francis and Death painted in the medieval period in
Italy is, to my knowledge, a slightly later fresco in the chapter house of the Santo
in Padua. My thanks to Dr. Laura Jacobus for bringing this image to my attention.
 the pilgrim’s progress 57

rests familiarly on the shoulder of a grinning corpse, who stands in

front of a wooden coffin and whose flesh is decaying to reveal his
skeleton.
Louis Jordan believes that the iconography was adapted from The
Three Living and the Three Dead, the famous fable in which three rich
youths meet three corpses, who warn them “What you are, we
were/And what we are, you will be.”63 However, he argues that
since the skeleton wears a crown, it does not represent one of the
Three Dead, but is rather the earliest known iconographic repre-
sentation of “King Death”.64 Chiara Frugoni has noted that numer-
ous Italian pictorial versions of The Three Living and the Three Dead
add the figure of a bearded hermit, brandishing a scroll.65 She argues
that the inclusion of this figure, who appropriates the words of the
Three Dead, turns the encounter into a meditation.66 The hermit
exhorts not only the Three Living but also the viewers to contem-
plate the scene, and to prepare for their own deaths by repenting
of their sins.
The spirituality of the medieval hermit was distinguished by poverty
and by preaching penitence;67 it is the latter characteristic that Frugoni
argues made the hermit a suitable narrator for the scene. St. Francis,
therefore, would also have been an appropriate choice.68 Francis’s

63
This text exists in various versions, mainly French, of which the best known
is the poem by Baudouin of Condé (ca. 1240–80), minstrel to Margaret, Countess
of Flanders. At least two Duecento representations of the story can be found in
Italy: the first in the north apse of the cathedral of Atri, in southern Italy; the sec-
ond in the grotto church of S. Margherita, Melfi. See Louis Edward Jordan III,
“The iconography of death in western medieval art to 1350,” Ph.D. dissertation,
Medieval Institute of Notre Dame University, Indiana, 1980, pp. 99–103.
64
Ibid., p. 109.
65
The earliest may be in the church of St. Flavian, Montefiascone, ca. 1320;
other fourteenth-century examples are in the Camposanto, Pisa and the Scala Santa,
Subiaco. See Chiara Settis Frugoni, “Il tema dell’Incontro dei tre vivi e dei tre
morti nella tradizione medioevale italiana,” Atti della accademia nazionale dei lincei: memo-
rie classe di scienze morale, storiche, e filologiche, series 8, vol. 13 (1967), fasc. 3, 145–251,
esp. 166–82.
66
Ibid., p. 173. On the predella panel by Bernardo Daddi in the Galleria
dell’Accademia in Florence (no. 6153) the hermit’s cartouche reads: “Costoro furono
re come voi, in questo modo sarete voi.”
67
According to Étienne Delaruelle, “Les ermits et la spiritualité populaire,” in
L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII: atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di stu-
dio, Mendola, 30 agosto–6 settembre 1962 (Milan, 1965), p. 219, “cette prédication est
donc essentiellement une ‘prédication de pénitence’.”
68
“. . . s’annonce par bien des traits saint François d’Assise qui, à de nombreux
égards, sera un héritier des ermites du XIe siècle.” Ibid., p. 241.
58 janet robson

gesture with his raised right hand reinforces his message to the viewer.
In the sixteenth century, Fra Ludovico da Pietralunga saw this as a
preacher’s gesture,69 while Lobrichon has likened it to a gesture of
welcome and acceptance.70 But only Gerhard Ruf (significantly, a
Franciscan himself ) has drawn attention to the importance of the
fact that, with this gesture, Francis prominently displays his stigmata.71
In one of his sermons on the Saint, Bonaventure had spoken of St.
Francis’s stigmata as a sign of penance, placed on him by God so
that he might be the model of penitence for all who were to come
after him.72
More is intended in this allegory than just a penitential medita-
tion on the certainty of death. In his account of the canonisation of
St. Francis in the Legenda maior, Bonaventure explained that God
made Francis more brilliant in death, by leaving signs of future glory
imprinted on his body. The stigmata were the sign of the living God,
the seal of Christ’s approval of Francis and a guarantee of his sanc-
tity that, as Bonaventure proclaimed, “confirm believers in faith, raise
them aloft with confident hope and set them ablaze with the fire of
charity”.73
In his chapter on Francis’s posthumous miracles, Bonaventure
begins with several concerning the stigmata themselves. The Saint
appears in the dreams of those who doubt the truth of the stigmata
and displays his wounds to them—beginning with no less a figure
than Pope Gregory IX.74 Bonaventure then recounts the healing of
a mortally wounded man from Ilerda, and asserts that it was from his
stigmata that Francis derived his posthumous thaumaturgical power.75
The importance ascribed to these two miracles by the Franciscans
at Assisi is demonstrated by their selection as the first two posthu-
mous miracles in the St. Francis fresco cycle of the Upper Church.
According to Bonaventure, the power of the stigmata was entirely
fitting. They were, after all, the brand marks of Christ who, through
his death and resurrection, had healed the human race through the

69
Fra’ Ludovico, p. 73.
70
Lobrichon, Assise, p. 107.
71
Ruf, Das Grab (see above, n. 9), p. 140.
72
Bonaventure, Evening Sermon on Saint Francis, preached at Paris, October 4, 1262,
trans. in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents 2, pp. 718–30 (on p. 721).
73
Bonaventure, Legenda maior, chap. 13, par. 9, trans. ibid., p. 637.
74
Bonaventure, Legenda maior, The Miracles, chap. 1, pars. 1–4, ibid., pp. 650–52.
75
Ibid., par. 5, pp. 651–52.
 the pilgrim’s progress 59

power of his wounds.76 The display of Francis’s hand to the pilgrim

entering the north transept was therefore a powerful symbol of hope
on two different levels. Firstly, to all those approaching the tomb in
the hope of receiving a miraculous cure, it displayed the Saint’s thau-
maturgical credentials. On another level, it offered the hope of eternal
life for all truly repentant believers. For, as Bonaventure had stressed,
Francis had received the singular privilege of the stigmata so that
“his most holy flesh . . . would offer by the newness of a miracle, a
glimpse of the resurrection”.77
Again this message fitted into the traditional ideology of pilgrim-
age. In a sermon addressed to pilgrims, Jacques de Vitry (†1240),
for example, had exhorted the pilgrim not to fear death but rather
to seek it willingly, in the certain belief that all those who die in
Christ’s service will be rewarded.78 De Vitry’s contemporary, Saint
Francis, expressed similar sentiments in the stanza he had added on
his deathbed to his Canticle of the Creatures, his vernacular hymn of
praise for creation:
Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no one living can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.79
While death was certain, its power could be transcended. Beda
Kleinschmidt long ago argued that this is why the crown on the
head of Death is shown beginning to topple. Death’s power could
be overturned: it is Francis, not Death, who is king.80
The meaning of this allegory is brought into sharper focus through
its contrast with another image of death, the Death of Judas (Fig. 9).
Part of Lorenzetti’s Passion Cycle, this scene occupies the same posi-
tion in the south transept as does Francis and Death in the north. As

76
Ibid., p. 652.
77
Legenda maior, chap. 15, par. 1, ibid., p. 645.
78
The sermon is unpublished. See Deborah Birch, “Jacques de Vitry and the
ideology of pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage Explored (see above, n. 26), pp. 79–93 (on p. 87).
79
Assisi Compilation (ca. 1244–60), chap. 7, trans. in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents
2, p. 121.
80
Beda Kleinschmidt, Die Basilika S. Francesco in Assisi 2 (Berlin, 1926), p. 211.
See also: Martin Gosebruch, “Gli affreschi di Giotto nel braccio destro del transetto
e nelle ‘vele’ centrali della Chiese Inferiore di San Francesco,” in Giotto e i giotteschi
in Assisi (see above, n. 7), pp. 129–98 (on p. 140); Ruf, Das Grab, p. 140.
60 janet robson

Ruf has noted, the two images function as pendants.81 While the
figure of Francis is an allegory of Hope, Judas is an allegory of
Despair, Hope’s antithesis.82 According to Matthew’s gospel, Judas,
who had betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, tried to repent
by returning the money to the high priests. But when they rejected
him, he went out and hanged himself.
Medieval theologians ascribed Judas’s suicide to despair. When a
man despairs, he fails to believe that God will forgive him his sins;
since by so doing he denies the infinite nature of God’s mercy,
despair is a mortal sin.83 If a theological definition such as this was
too technical to have much impact on most lay folk, the dramatic
story of Judas’s suicide, as depicted in popular texts or images, was
a different matter. The Franciscans made use of it to great didactic
effect. Bonaventure, in the Tree of Life, explained what happened
when Judas saw Christ bound and led away to his death:
It was then that the impious Judas himself, driven by remorse, became
so filled with self-loathing that he preferred death to life. Yet woe to
the man who lost the hope of being forgiven even then—who, terror-
stricken by the enormity of his crime, gave up to despair instead of
returning, even then, to the Source of all mercy.84
Through his despair, Judas lost the hope of salvation, and his reward
was bodily death and eternal damnation. As a failed penitent, the
hanged Judas was displayed in the Lower Church as the opposite
of St. Francis and of all the hopeful penitents depicted in the Magdalen
Chapel.

81
I have argued elsewhere (“Judas and the Franciscans”) that the Death of Judas
is aimed primarily at the friars themselves, since the perspective of the fictive arch
beneath which the suicide hangs is best viewed by the friars as they exit from the
choir and leave the church via this staircase, which leads out into the cloister.
However, it is interesting to note that both the frontal pose of Francis and the
three-quarters profile of Judas’s body support a counter-clockwise route around the
transepts: the pilgrim entering from the Magdalen Chapel would see the image of
Francis straight on, but having passed behind the altar into the south transept would
view the image of Judas obliquely from the right.
82
For the development of images of Judas as allegories of despair, see Janet
Robson, “Speculum imperfectionis: the image of Judas in late medieval Italy,” Ph.D.
dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2001, chapter 5,
“‘Terror-stricken by the enormity of his crime.’ Judas desperatus.”
83
See for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, II:II, q. 20, art. 3, resp.
84
The Works of Bonaventure 1, pp. 118–19.
 the pilgrim’s progress 61

A few years before the execution of the frescoes in the lower

transepts in Assisi, Giotto had painted the Arena Chapel in Padua.
Its decorative scheme included a series of Virtues on the south wall,
each of which faces its opposing Vice on the north wall. The final
pair are Hope and Despair, placed adjacent to the Last Judgment on
the west wall. So, as the winged figure of Hope (Fig. 10) flies up to
receive from Christ her reward of a crown, she appears to be soar-
ing up towards Heaven and the Blessed.85 On the other hand, Despair
(Fig. 11), who is hanging herself, is about to have her soul seized
by a winged demon that has swooped down from Hell to claim her.86
Despair is inspired by the Devil, and leads to death and damnation.
Although Giotto’s Despair is the earliest-known painting of this Vice
in Italian art, she had been depicted as a suicide in French art from
the thirteenth century. But in these examples, she was always shown
killing herself with a sword or a spear.87 By choosing to make her
a suicide by hanging, Giotto associates Despair explicitly with Judas.
Given the significance of Judas in the iconography of the Arena
Chapel, this was obviously intentional. However, I believe the decision
was also an aesthetic one, because it enabled Giotto to intensify the
contrast between the vice and the virtue, by showing Despair falling
and Hope rising.
At Assisi, the Giottesque artists in the north transept continued to
use rising gestures to represent hope and falling ones for despair.
Both are used to maximum effect in the two posthumous miracles
of St. Francis that are placed to either side of Francis Conquering Death,
which express in narrative form the message of the allegory. The
two miracles have much in common: in both cases a young boy is
resurrected after having died in a fall.
It general terms, it is not difficult to imagine why this type of mir-
acle was chosen: resurrection is perhaps the most powerful miracle
of all, and it is a highly suitable subject to be situated near a Saint’s
tomb. In addition, if our pilgrims had just entered the transept from
the Magdalen Chapel, they would have seen these images immedi-
ately after the Raising of Lazarus, a juxtaposition that would have

85
Selma Pfeiffenberger, “The iconology of Giotto’s virtues and vices at Padua,”
Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1966, II:3:3–5.
86
Ibid., II:3:7.
87
Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. Henry
Bober (Princeton, 1984), p. 111.
62 janet robson

underlined the theme of Francis alter Christus. Since these miracles

appear beneath scenes from the Infancy of Christ, the choice of child
miracles also seems natural. But even limiting the choice of scenes
to posthumous resurrections of children, the Legenda maior, as well as
Thomas of Celano’s earlier Tractatus de miraculis, offer a number of
suitable choices. As I discussed above, the depiction of posthumous
miracles was often linked to the promotion of a saint’s cult, par-
ticularly in its early stages, and with attempts to achieve canonisa-
tion. Neither of these conditions applied, since Francis had long been
canonised and his cult was well established. Unlike three of the four
posthumous miracles depicted on the Tesoro panel, which was prob-
ably installed in the Lower Church in time for the consecration of
1253,88 the north transept miracles take place far from the tomb of
St. Francis. The first is set in Rome and the other in Suessa, in
southern Italy. Both might therefore be seen as advertising the efficacy
of Francis as a thaumaturge, even at long distance. In addition, in
both cases the miracle is granted in response to the prayers and
vows of the distraught parents. In the Miracle of the Roman Notary’s
Son, according to Bonaventure, the boy’s father vows “forever [to]
be the servant of the saint”, while in the Miracle of the Boy of Suessa,
it is the mother who promises “to cover the altar of the blessed
Francis with a new altar cloth”.89
But both miracles might also have been chosen for the symbolic
possibilities of the fall. The Miracle of the Roman Notary’s Son (Fig. 12),
to the left of Francis and Death, uses continuous narrative to combine
accident and miracle in a single pictorial frame. The little boy, left
unwillingly at home when his mother goes off to church, contrives

88
See Cook, Images of St. Francis (see above, n. 22), cat. no. 27, pp. 62–63. The
panel is now in the Museo-Tesoro of the Sacro Convento.
89
Legenda maior, p. 657 and p. 658. This aspect seems to have been more impor-
tant to Celano, whose versions are more elaborate in both cases. The Roman father
also promises he “will regularly visit his holy place”, while the mother in Suessa
also promises to “wreathe the altar with silver thread” and to “encircle the whole
church with candles”. (Celano, Treatise on the Miracles, trans. Francis of Assisi: Early
Documents 2, p. 421 and p. 423 respectively.) Although these vows have sometimes
been interpreted as promises to visit the Basilica in Assisi, this is not stated in the
texts: the mother in Rome and the father in Suessa are more likely to have offered
their ex votos in their respective local Franciscan churches. See Cannon and Vauchez,
Margherita, pp. 57–60 for a revealing account of ex voto offerings made at the shrine
of Margherita of Cortona, the devotional practices associated with candles, tapers
and girdles, and the encircling of tombs and churches.
 the pilgrim’s progress 63

to fall out of the window of the family palazzo, and is killed. On the
left of the painting, we see the accident and the despair: the boy is
in mid-air, plummeting head-first from the window, distraught onlook-
ers helpless to intervene. The texts explain how, shortly after the
tragedy, a Franciscan friar arrives on the scene and asks the father
whether he believes in St. Francis’s power to raise his son from the
dead, “through the love he always had for Christ, who was crucified
to give life back to all”.90 The artist shows the friar and his com-
panion surrounded by the townspeople and clergy in supplication.
In the midst of this ritual of prayer, the child is depicted a second
time, restored and back on his feet, both hands raised in thanks-
giving. We do not see the performance of the miracle by St. Francis,
but only an angel flying up towards the top left.91
In Bonaventure’s account of the miracle, it is the boy’s mother
who expresses her anguish at the boy’s death, while it is the father
who firmly declares his faith in the Saint. The father is probably
the elegantly-dressed man wearing a gown and cap who kneels in
the foreground, pressing his palms together in front of his chest in
prayer. However, the most striking figure in the scene is the young
woman in red—surely the mother—shown in profile against the sky
at the back. She prays with a gesture similar to her husband’s, but
raises her hands much higher, while casting her eyes towards heaven.
The mode of praying with palms joined had, in the first half of the
thirteenth century, gradually replaced the archaic orans gesture of
extended, separated hands.92 Moshe Barasch has argued that while
Giotto always used the newer gesture for prayer, he occasionally

90
Legenda maior, p. 657.
91
There are remnants of a second figure to the angel’s left, whose halo can just
be made out. Because of the poor state of the fresco, it is impossible to identify
this figure: is it another angel, or St. Francis himself? The former is more proba-
ble, since it seems unlikely that that Francis would have been portrayed with his
face obscured by the battlement of the house.
92
Gerhart B. Ladner, “The gestures of prayer in papal iconography of the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries,” in Didascaliae: Studies in Honour of Anselm M Albareda,
ed. S. Prete (Rome, 1961), pp. 247–75, relates the gesture to the feudal ceremony
of commendation, but also to its introduction into liturgy in the thirteenth century,
including the elevation of the host of the Mass, the consecration of bishops and
the rite of penance. William R. Levin, in “Two gestures of Virtue in Italian late
medieval and Renaissance art,” Southeastern College Art Conference Review 13, no. 4 (1999),
325–46, points out that all these instances of the gesture’s use are linked by hope,
“which is the pivot on which the elements of surrender and offering, of dependence
and trust implicit in the gesture of raising and joining the hands all turn.” (p. 334).
64 janet robson

employed a variation, in which the hands are raised much higher—

as is the case for the mother here. This dramatic gesture seems to
be used by the artist to convey emotional intensity.93
The message of hope transmitted through the pose of the pray-
ing mother is accentuated through the device of continuous narra-
tive: she is placed back-to-back with an earlier version of herself,
who is looking up at her son falling from the window. The juxta-
position of these two episodes allows the artist to contrast the figure
of the hopeful mother, reaching urgently up to heaven for aid, with
the desperate little boy plunging down from the window behind her.
These themes of hope and despair, with their associated rising
and falling motifs, are continued in the Miracle of the Boy of Suessa.
This story receives an extensive treatment, being divided into two
separate scenes on the end wall of the north transept. The entire
first scene is a depiction of death and despair (Fig. 13). A young
boy is killed when the house in which he is playing collapses. On
the left, we see the destruction of the building (another symbolic
fall), the dead boy at the bottom, crushed beneath the rubble. The
focal point is not the boy’s death, however, but the intense anguish
of his mother. The men carrying out the body are met by a group
of women, wailing and tearing at their hair and faces in an agony of
grief. The mother bends over her son, as his head and arm loll back,
falling from the men’s grasp. Clutching his hair, pressing him close,
her eyes clench shut, but her open mouth emits a contorted cry of
pain and loss.
In the second scene (Fig. 14), the mood is swiftly transformed as
the miracle unfolds. Now the boy is placed at the top of the pic-
ture frame and his movement is upwards. As the funeral cortege
arrives in the street below, St. Francis is seen flying down to the
boy in the upper room, taking him by the hand and raising him
up. Down below, we see the surprise and dawning joy of the men
as the amazing news arrives.
* * *
Our pilgrims, having witnessed this sequence of images of hope, res-
urrection and saintly power, now leave the north transept and, pass-
ing behind the high altar, cross to the other side.94 Immediately

93
Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 68–71.
94
I have deliberately omitted from my argument any discussion of the frescoed
 the pilgrim’s progress 65

before them, on the end wall, is Pietro Lorenzetti’s Resurrection

Cycle. As in the Magdalen Chapel, the disposition of the narrative
now moves from bottom to top, as the theme is transformed from
despair into hope. On the right, in the Entombment (Fig. 15), the
movement of all the figures is downwards, into the tomb, with the
single exception of the Magdalen. She stands in the centre, her
haloed head slightly higher than the others, pressing her hands
together and raising them high in front of her. Both her red clothes
and her powerful gesture recall the mother of the Roman boy in
the north transept (Fig. 12). She is the only hopeful figure in the
scene, and Lobrichon points out the deliberate contrast that is being
drawn here between the Magdalen and the falling body of the despair-
ing Judas, whose suicide is placed at right angles to this Entombment.95
The second scene of despair is the Deposition (Fig. 16). Eschewing
Duccio’s composition on the Maestà, where the body of Christ jack-
knifes forward from the waist, Lorenzetti draws instead on a local
Franciscan model. In the nave of the Lower Church, the St. Francis
Master had depicted Christ falling backwards from the Cross. Because
of the partial destruction of the fresco, we can no longer see the

altarpieces attributed to Simone Martini in the north transept and to Pietro Lorenzetti
in the south. Consideration of how the side altars and shrines in the sanctuary
might have been viewed and used by pilgrims is a subject I hope to return to in
the future.
I have also assumed that the two transept chapels dedicated to St. John the
Baptist and to St. Nicholas of Bari would not have formed an integral part of the
pilgrim’s tour. It seems unlikely that pilgrims would have had free access into these
private chapels, whose patron was Cardinal Napoleone Orsini. In the St. Nicholas
Chapel, which contains the tomb of Napoleone’s brother Gian Gaetano, Orsini
ownership could hardly have been asserted more insistently: the family coat-of-arms
originally appeared at least 69 times (Lunghi, “La perduta decorazione” [see above,
n. 8], p. 500). The majority of these emblems were positioned where they could
be seen from outside the chapel—in the stained glass, in the frescoed window embra-
sures, in the marble socles below the windows, and even worked into the wrought-
iron gates that were in still in place across the chapel entrance when Fra Ludovico
wrote his description.
It is, however, interesting to note that the iconographic choices for these chapels
seem to have taken into account the overall scheme for the Lower Church transepts.
The St. Nicholas Chapel, like the north transept to which it is adjacent, strongly
features child miracles. But perhaps even more interesting for my own argument is
the decoration of the counter-facade. Below the dedicatory fresco, images of the
Penitent Magdalen and St. John the Baptist, both in a rocky desert terrain, are
paired to either side of the entrance arch. Once again, strong exemplars of peni-
tence are offered to the viewer as preparation for entering the sanctuary. No doubt
these themes would have been reiterated in the St. John the Baptist Chapel, had
its decorative programme been executed.
95
Lobrichon, Assise, p. 134.
66 janet robson

position of Christ’s head, but a later version of the scene attributed

to the same artist, on an altarpiece for San Francesco al Prato in
Perugia, shows Christ’s head, like the Virgin’s, still upright.96 Lorenzetti’s
inspiration for Christ’s head hanging upside-down comes from the
Death of the Boy of Suessa (Fig. 13) on the opposite wall, as Max Seidel
has pointed out.97 The parallels of meaning offered to the pilgrim
are obvious: both scenes depict mothers grieving over their dead
sons. Both invite the viewer’s compassio with these displays of maternal
anguish. But the Trecento pilgrim is also able to step outside the
historical time of the events depicted, and so enjoy the knowledge
that, through divine power, both sons will be resurrected, grief will
be turned to joy and despair to hope.
In the two upper scenes, this journey into joy is fulfilled. In the
Harrowing of Hell (Fig. 17), Christ, the symbol of hope, pulls Adam
out of Limbo, while Satan (another archetype of Despair) topples
backwards, flailing hopelessly, and is trampled underfoot. Again the
pilgrim is offered a deliberate iconographic parallel with the boy of
Suessa, but this time with the miracle, not the catastrophe. The
linked hands of Christ and Adam repeat those of St. Francis and
the resurrected boy (Fig. 14). The last scene in the cycle is the
Resurrection (Fig. 18). The iconography of Christ stepping out of the
sarcophagus, already common in northern Europe, seems to have
been adopted here for the first time in Italian painting.98 It imparts
a much stronger visual message than the traditional Italian iconog-
raphy, the three Maries at the empty tomb. Christ is physically ris-
ing up, in contrast with the Roman soldiers down below: slumped

96
Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, inv.no.22. For a colour illustration,
see The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi, eds. Giovanni Morello and Laurence B.
Kanter (Milan, 1999), fig. 6/9, p. 78. This pose was common on Pisan and Lucchese
painted crucifixes from the second half of the Duecento. Also, Lorenzetti would
probably have been familiar with it from his home city: the mural of the Deposition,
recently discovered in the crypt of Siena Cathedral, uses the same iconography.
See Sotto il Duomo di Siena. Scoperte archeologiche, architettoniche e figurative, ed. Roberto
Guerrini (Milan, 2003), fig. 34, p. 131.
97
Max Seidel, “Das Frühwerk von Pietro Lorenzetti,” Städel Jahrbuch n.s. 8 (1981),
79–158 (on p. 149).
98
Tino da Camaino used the same motif at about the same time, on the tomb
of Cardinal Petroni, ca. 1317, in Siena Cathedral. However, there is an example
in the stained-glass windows of the apse of the Upper Church at Assisi, dated
ca. 1255, created by northern artists. See Frank Martin, Die Glasmalereien (see above,
n. 44), cat. no. 45, p. 250 and colour plate 47.
 the pilgrim’s progress 67

and slumbering, blind to the knowledge of the Resurrection, these

are more figures of despair, in contrast to the hope that is the risen
Lord.99
Turning their heads to their left, our pilgrims would find them-
selves confronting Lorenzetti’s monumental Crucifixion (Fig. 19), the
largest single painting in the Lower Church. Once again, what is
offered is a contrast between figures of Hope and Despair, this time
exemplified by the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ.
While the Bad Thief denies the divinity of Christ and perishes, the
Good Thief repents and is promised paradise. The Good Thief is
placed on Christ’s right here, while below him we see the conver-
sion of the Roman centurion, Longinus, gazing up at Christ from
his white horse. Our pilgrims would already have seen these figures
pictured in the entrance arch of the Magdalen Chapel (Fig. 6), and
although those earlier depictions were by a different artist, Lorenzetti
seems to have tried to emulate their characterisations, so that they
are recognisably the same two people. As we have seen, the Franciscans
considered the Good Thief a penitent—indeed, he is one of the most
hopeful of all penitential models, as Bonaventure makes clear in this
passage from one of his popular Passion meditations, The Mystical
Vine:
How great is this robber’s confidence! He knows that everything in
him is malice and nothing good, that he is a transgressor of the law,
a ravisher of both the goods and the life of his neighbour. Now, in
his last hour, on the threshold of death, despairing of this present life,
he yet dares to seek reassurance in the hope of that future life which
he has forfeited time and again, and has never deserved. Who could
despair when this thief still hopes?100
Once more, the messages inherent in the scene are amplified through
the interplay of images across the space of the transept. On the
opposite wall from the Crucifixion, on the lowest tier, are the Death of
Judas (Fig. 9) and the Stigmatisation of St. Francis (Fig. 20). Like the
Good and Bad Thieves, Francis and Judas are paired as meaning-
ful opposites. The despairing Judas, having no hope in God’s mercy,

99
Sleep, seen as a miniature death, is a metaphor for despair used by St.
Augustine. See Susan Snyder, “The left hand of God: despair in medieval and
Renaissance tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965), 18–59 (on p. 58).
100
The Mystical Vine: Treatise on the Passion of the Lord, trans. in The Works of Bonaventure
1, p. 173.
68 janet robson

falls to his destruction and eternal damnation. St. Francis, in con-

trast, ascends to his mystical union with Christ. The placement of
the Stigmatisation opposite the Crucifixion emphasises Francis as the alter
Christus, while its pairing with the Death of Judas serves above all to
remind our pilgrims of Bonaventure’s assertion that Francis had
received the stigmata so that “his most holy flesh . . . would offer by
the newness of a miracle, a glimpse of the resurrection”.101 Through
the Stigmatisation, Francis received the same promise that Christ had
made to the Good Thief, and that he proffers to all hopeful peni-
tents: “Today, you shall be with me in Paradise.”
Uplifted by these positive messages, at last our pilgrims reach the
tomb of the Saint. As they kneel before the high altar, the view of
the west wall offers a final set of images, whose individual meanings
are brought out fully through their spatial inter-relationships. The
Death of Judas and the Stigmatisation of St. Francis to the south would
have been followed by the central, lost Allegory of the Stigmatisation in
the apse, with the Glorification of St. Francis (Fig. 4) above it in the
vele; finally, to the north, the Miracle of the Roman Notary’s Son and St.
Francis Conquers Death.
From this position, the pilgrims would for the first time have seen
the Death of Judas (Fig. 9) and Francis and Death (Fig. 8) as a pair.
These sum up the basic binary oppositions offered throughout the
fresco programme: impenitence versus repentance, despair versus hope,
death versus life, Hell versus Heaven. The inner pair of Franciscan
miracles, the Stigmatisation (Fig. 20) and the Roman Notary’s Son (Fig. 12)
remind us of the Saint’s thaumaturgical powers and offer the hope
of resurrection. The composition of both these scenes draws the eye
towards the centre and upwards: the kneeling St. Francis looks diag-
onally up to the right, towards the Christ-Seraph, while the angel
in the miracle scene flies diagonally up to the left. Lobrichon sug-
gested that the angel was flying towards the tomb of the Saint, whose
power it has invoked,102 but I believe the angle of the flight suggests
that the angel was actually flying up into the apse.
The images in the apse and vele were closely linked. Placed above
the body of the Saint, they are the culminating statements in the
Lower Church of his power and his glory. In the Glorification (Fig. 4),

101
See note 77.
102
Lobrichon, Assise, p. 107.
 the pilgrim’s progress 69

Francis is a dazzling, radiant heavenly presence, enthroned and sur-

rounded by adoring angels. Lunghi has argued that the iconogra-
phy draws, at least in part, on prophecies made in the writings of
Ubertino da Casale and Peter John Olivi that Francis would be bod-
ily resurrected in the same way as Christ and the Virgin.103 The
Saint’s glorious and incorrupt body is here contrasted with the images
below it: to the left, the disembowelled corpse of the damned sui-
cide Judas; to the right, the decomposing cadaver of defeated Death.
According to Fra Ludovico’s detailed description of the apse, the
central image showed the Saint being crowned by two angels, a
winged Crucifix above his head.104 Entering the north transept, the
pilgrim had already seen the crown teetering on the head of Death,
as Francis overturned its power. Just as in the Arena Chapel Giotto’s
Hope reaches for a crown offered to her by Christ (Fig. 10), now the
Saint receives the crown of life, the symbol of the “future bliss” that
is hope’s reward.
But in this apse image, Francis is giving as well as receiving. The
Saint was described as standing with his arms open in the shape of
the Cross (and, we can be sure, displaying once more his stigmata),
sheltering beneath him a group of about forty friars, nuns and other
faithful men and women.105 The solitary surviving fragment that has
been identified with this fresco is the head of a nun looking up to
the left, and she must surely have come from this band of suppli-
cants.106 By kneeling at the tomb, the Trecento pilgrim joined this
group of faithful devotees, sharing with them the promise of Francis’s
aid, intercession and protection.
Pilgrims to the tomb of the Saint would have come there for a
mixture of reasons. Some in penitence, some in piety—some to give
thanks for grace received, some seeking help in time of trouble or
sickness. The programme of Trecento frescoes in the Lower Church
would have enhanced the experience of the shrine for each of them,

103
Lunghi, “La perduta decorazione,” p. 508.
104
Fra’ Ludovico, pp. 62–64. This part of the image may be reflected in Simone
Martini’s St. Louis of Toulouse altarpiece, where the Saint is also crowned by two
angels. For a colour illustration, see Hayden B.J. Maginnis, The World of the Early
Sienese Painter (University Park, PA, 2001), colour plate 16.
105
Fra’ Ludovico, p. 63.
106
Szépmüvészeti Muzeum, Budapest, inv. no. 30. For a colour illustration, see
Giotto: Bilancio critico di sessant’anni di studi e ricerche, Firenze, Galleria dell’Accademia, 5
guigno–30 settembre 2000, ed. Angelo Tartuferi (Florence, 2000), cat. no. 8, plate 8.
70 janet robson

offering its messages of hope, solace and salvation in dramatic visual

language, packing a strong emotional punch. Surely no pilgrim leav-
ing the Lower Church at Assisi could doubt Bonaventure’s assertion
about St. Francis, in the final chapter of the Legenda maior:
The Lord made incomparably more brilliant in death this marvellous
man, whom He had made marvellously bright in life.107

107
Legenda maior, chap. 15, par. 1, p. 645.