ملف:Giotto - Legend of St Francis - -04- - Miracle of the Crucifix.jpg

(b. 1267, Vespignano, d. 1337, Firenze)

Legend of St Francis: 4. Miracle of the Crucifix 1297-99 Fresco, 270 x 230 cm Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi

This is the fourth of the twenty-eight scenes (twenty-five of which were painted by Giotto) of Legend of Saint Francis.

As if they were intended to emphasize the personal and private nature of the saint's early life, the first scenes are very simple, and contain few figures. This is especially evident in the Miracle of the Crucifix, where there are only two basic elements, the dilapidated church - where we can see the crucifix on the altar - and the young St Francis. The church, set at an oblique angle, is shown with segments of the wall removed (like a broken vase) both to symbolise its state of moral decay and to enable us to see the interior with the speaking crucifix. St Francis is there symbolically rather than actually, painted on a larger scale than the building.

This treatment of figure and architecture as independent elements was to remain a feature of fourteenth-century painting, becoming accentuated in the early fifteenth-century, and employed in a deliberately unnaturalistic way in certain late Gothic works.The conception of a pictorial story as an agglomeration of separate incidents was to be greatly simplified in Giotto's later works, especially in the frescoes in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in Santa Croce. But it took the rationalism of Brunelleschi, and the art of Donatello and Masaccio to do away with it completely.

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Author: GIOTTO di Bondone Title: Legend of St Francis: 4. Miracle of the Crucifix Time-line: 1301-1350 School: Italian Form: painting