Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  The famous smiling angel on the facade of the cathedral at Rheims. (Photo Credit 6.1)

  Jesus as Pantocrator (All-Ruler), in an eleventh-century Greek mosaic that dominates the ceiling of the monastery church at Daphni. (Photo Credit 6.2)

  Francis knew nothing technical about the arts, at least nothing beyond a rudimentary appreciation of the new lyricism of his time. Though his prayers did indeed bear the imprint of the troubadours, he never attempted to make a mosaic, to paint, or to draw. Nor is there any record of his writing or directing a mystery play or even putting on the plainest of one-acters. But he understood the importance of gesture—of corporeal expression that speaks beyond words—and so he was able to do something that would profoundly affect both plastic and performance arts, that took the new lyrical sensibility and combined it with a barely born ocular sensibility, and that brought both to a fruition never before dreamed.

  In the generation after Francis, the most notable Franciscan was the Italian master Bonaventure, a contentiously conservative figure at the University of Paris, who as general of the order attempted unsuccessfully to prevent Roger Bacon from publishing his discoveries. He also, after collecting many eyewitness accounts, wrote a biography of Francis, an account full of marvels, not all of which we need take literally. It contains, however, a particularly instructive narrative of the Great Gesturer at Christmastide:

  Now three years before his death it befell that he was minded, at the town of Greccio, to celebrate the memory of the Birth of the Child Jesus, with all the added solemnity that he might, for the kindling of devotion. That this might not seem an innovation, he sought and obtained licence from the Supreme Pontiff, and then made ready a manger, and bade hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought unto the place. The Brethren were called together, the folk assembled, the wood echoed with their voices, and that august night was made radiant and solemn with many bright lights, and with tuneful and sonorous praises. The man of God, filled with tender love, stood before the manger, bathed in tears, and overflowing with joy. Solemn Masses were celebrated over the manger, Francis, the Levite of Christ, chanting the Holy Gospel. Then he preached unto the folk standing round the Birth of the King in poverty, calling Him, when he wished to name Him, the Child of Bethlehem, by reason of his tender love for Him. A certain knight, valorous and true, Messer John of Greccio, who for the love of Christ had left the secular army, and was bound by closest friendship unto the man of God, declared that he beheld a little Child right fair to see sleeping in that manger, Who seemed awakened from sleep when the blessed Father Francis embraced him in both arms.

  If this translation gives some sense of Bonaventure’s credulous piety and of his tendency to wrap the founder of his order in unearthly light, it also has about it the sort of emotional ambience we still seek out at Christmas. There is no reason to doubt that John of Greccio gave this narrative to Bonaventure, though we needn’t believe that the wooden Babe in the manger came alive at Francis’s touch, only that John in the unearthly illumination of Christmas night believed that was what he saw.

  Francis of Assisi’s first presepio or crèche. Fresco by Giotto in the basilica at Assisi. Note the reduced size of ox and ass, meant perhaps to minimize their importance in this scene. (Photo Credit 6.3)

  There is some slight evidence that Italians before Francis may have been known to fashion a wooden bambino to lay before the altar at the midnight Christ-mass. But leading an ox and an ass into the sanctuary was an original idea. With it began the tradition of the presepio, or Christmas crèche, the practice of arranging a tableau of live creatures, both animal and human, near the Christmas altar, to portray the story of the first Christmas night. Eventually, the tradition divided in two, giving us a crèche of statues on display throughout the Christmas season and a pageant of live actors, usually children, to dramatize the Christmas story separately. But leave it to Francis to lead large live animals into the church and even to insist on real hay.

  Bonaventure is intent on telling us many things: that Francis first sought the pope’s permission for his innovation (most unlikely), that Francis acted as deacon, chanting the gospel of Christmas and giving a tender sermond (most likely), and that all was radiant and solemn, tuneful and sonorous (more or less, no doubt). But the biographer seems not to have noticed the import of what Francis was doing. Francis must have asked himself several questions before directing this wonderfully excessive display: what did the stable look like? what was it like to give birth to a child there “betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass”? what did the baby look like? what did the baby feel? As Francis had told his friend John, “I wish to make a memorial of that child who was born in Bethlehem and, as far as is possible, behold with bodily eyes the hardships of his infant state, lying on hay in a manger with the ox and the ass standing by.” Though Bonaventure fails to name them, it’s possible, even likely, that Francis on this or another occasion brought in a nursing mother to play Mary and a man to play Joseph, perhaps children to play angels. Eventually, of course, there would be shepherds, wise men and their train, and a whole menagerie that included sheep, a cock, and even camels.

  This archetypal tableau, presented to the people of Greccio in the vale of Rieti on Christmas night in the year 1223, announced the end of the ikon and the beginning of realism. No more would the visual artist make a kind of Christian idol to be bowed before and held in awe. No more would traveling companies offer merely symbolic dramas with actors brought onstage to illustrate virtues and vices, as in the medieval drama Everyman—who is never any particular man.e The wholly new question to be asked was historical, emotional, particular, and human: what would it have been like to be there? This question, never asked before, was still being asked at the end of the Second World War by men like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini as they set aside fancy-dress filmmaking and artificial indoor sets and went out to the broken streets, peeling stairwells, pitted walls, and piteous disorder of Rome to direct the first films of Italian Neorealism, gathering ordinary people—nonactors—to play many parts. In the town of Greccio on Christmas night in 1223 were born the arts as we still know them.

  The story is told by Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century Florentine artist and architect whose Lives of other artists is more famous than any of his surviving paintings and buildings. One day, probably in the late 1270s, a man was riding from Florence to Vespignano. He was Cimabue, the greatest artist of his day, whose tender brushstrokes had already departed, if a little tentatively, from the still-dominant Greek tradition. Cimabue passed a field where a boy of ten was watching sheep for his father. But this boy was no mere shepherd, for he was watching the sheep with a pointed stone in one hand while drawing a likeness of a sheep on a larger stone, “a flat, smooth slab.” Cimabue dismounted to take a closer look and was amazed by the drawing he saw. Here was a ten-year-old peasant who was a talented artist. At Cimabue’s invitation, the boy, Giotto di Bondone, went to work in Cimabue’s Florentine studio. By his late teens he was painting panels for local churches. By about the age of twenty Giotto could be found on a scaffold at Assisi in the nave of the just-completed basilica, painting frescoes to adorn the lavish new church dedicated to Assisi’s new saint. Though Francis would have decried such attention to himself (he had, after all, asked to be buried among convicted criminals), we can only be grateful that the basilica that rose over his bones became the occasion for the astonishing homage that Giotto would render.

  Sixth-century Byzantine Virgin and Child in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. (Photo Credit 6.4)

  Before we allow ourselves to drown happily in the splendor of Assisi, we should take a quick overall look at Giotto’s (equally quick) development from sketching shepherd to assured painter. Whatever his sheep may have looked like, the artistic models that surrounded the boy Giotto were all severely Greek.f He would have been familiar with the standard apparitions that loomed everywhere in thirteenth-century Italy. Two images, in particular, were omnipresent: Virg
in and Child Enthroned and Christ Crucified. No matter where you went, they pretty much seemed the same, awesomely rigid images to be looked up to and invoked. In Cimabue’s scarce surviving works, we can trace his break with this ikonic tradition. His Virgin, at least when contrasted with its Greek model, is sweet and smiling, his Child actually childlike. Giotto goes further: though his earliest (probable) madonna—a badly damaged study in tempera on a wooden panel—may be a bit stiff, she looks like a real woman, someone who might actually show up this afternoon at the parish church of Borgo San Lorenzo in Florence, where the panel is still displayed. The teenage Giotto’s model was no Greek ikon but a local mother; and from her watchful expression we can still surmise that she had mixed feelings about serving as model for this brutal-looking boy.

  Cimabue’s Madonna and Child with Angels and Prophets, painted c. 1260 for the Church of the Trinity, Florence, and now in the Uffizi Gallery. (Photo Credit 6.5)

  Giotto’s wryly realistic Madonna of Borgo San Lorenzo. (Photo Credit 6.6)

  For Giotto, the creator of so much beauty, was himself no beauty. Giovanni Boccaccio, the daring Florentine satirist who was Giotto’s younger contemporary, reminds us that “amazing genius is often found to have been placed in the ugliest of men”—and that Giotto was one of these, a man of bottomless humility, who “always refused to be called ‘Maestro,’ even though he was the master of all living artists and had rightfully acquired the title. And this title which he refused shone all the more brightly in him in that it was eagerly usurped by those who knew far less than himself, or by his own disciples. But for all the greatness of his art, neither was he physically more handsome, nor had he a face more pleasing in any way, than Messer Forese da Rabatta”—whom Boccaccio has previously described as having “a small, deformed body, and a flat, pushed-in face.” No doubt Boccaccio is exaggerating slightly for the sake of his narrative, but we learn from other witnesses that Giotto had an excessively broad face and a short, stout, barrel-chested body and that he always maintained the manner of a modest man—not the usual way with artists then or now.

  Giotto’s subsequent madonnas, the virgins of his mature art, go even further in the direction of realistic portrayal. His Ognissanti Madonna, now in the Uffizi in Florence, has an insouciant air—her lips parted in a half smile over her white teeth, her young breasts pointed and pressing against her nearly translucent white dress—that would have been impossible to any painter before him. This madonna’s expression is reserved but earthy and almost amused.

  There is never anything amusing about crucifixion, but even in this subject we may trace Giotto’s development. The severe Greek ikon gives way in Cimabue’s curvilinear treatment to a more supple, more balletic, less exalted sense of the human body. Giotto, in his crucifixions, however, eschews all artistic swish: here is a good man dying on a cross, surrounded by his few suffering friends. That’s all. Don’t show off, artista. Don’t even reach for anything like gory sensationalism. Pity, that’s all. Pity and profound reverence for human suffering. And silent contemplation. However innovative, however magisterial his work becomes, Giotto’s reverent humility makes all his art into prayer. He is, in the truest sense, Franciscan.

  Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (Madonna of All Saints), now in the Uffizi. (Photo Credit 6.7)

  Cimabue’s Crucifixion at Arezzo. (Photo Credit 6.8)

  Thirteenth-century Greek Crucifixion. (Photo Credit 6.9)

  Giotto’s Crucifixion in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. (Photo Credit 6.10)

  Giotto, throughout his adult life a Franciscan tertiary—a lay (presumably married) member of the Franciscan order—must have felt deeply his vocation to portray the life of Francis in paint on the walls of the upper church in Assisi’s new basilica. Still working formally under the tutelage of Cimabue, who had been given the commission to oversee the decoration of the upper church, Giotto was allowed, it would appear, complete freedom over the series of twenty-eight frescoed scenes that would adorn the lower walls—a quiet admission, perhaps, by Cimabue that his student had already surpassed him. The result would be a necklace of scenes so detailed and complete in their physicality that Europe had seen nothing like them since the long-ago death of classical fresco art.

  The technique of making a fresco is excruciating in its demands on the artist, for the scene must be painted rapidly on wet plaster (fresco meaning “fresh” in Italian). The artist can sketch out for completion only as much of the scene as he can confidently cover in one day’s light, for by the time the sun returns the next day the wall will already be too dry. The advantage of such a technique is that the pigments fuse with the wall itself during the drying process, becoming more permanent and, in their effect on the viewer, more substantial and profound, for the colors take on a vivid depth and eternality impossible on a wooden panel. The disadvantage, in addition to the anxiety of racing against time, is that there is no going back, no possibility of correcting a mistake at a later date.

  In Giotto’s frescoes, Francis at all times wears his golden halo—without which detail the friars of the basilica would undoubtedly have been unwilling to pay for the paint. But in other ways there is scant allowance for otherworldliness. The three-dimensionality of the figures is unlike anything seen since ancient times, thanks to careful gradations of color, which turn darker toward the edges of each figure. To thirteenth-century eyes, each figure in these scenes might as well have been a hologram, for it seemed to pop out and become as rounded as in life, “making it,” as Boccaccio claimed, “so much like its original in Nature that it seemed more like the original than a reproduction. Many times, in fact, while looking at paintings by this man, the observer’s visual sense was known to err, taking what was painted to be the very thing itself.” Though at first glance the scenes made by Giotto and his assistants—of whom we can identify at least four—look to us like paintings of the late thirteenth century, we can with a little effort come to see them with the eyes of Giotto’s contemporaries.

  Renunciation of Worldly Goods by Giotto, Basilica of Saint Francis, Assisi. (Photo Credit 6.11)

  The saint is often seen in profile—an absolute no-no in Byzantine ikonography and a startling innovation in Giotto’s time—and in physical association with other human beings, giving, taking, talking, confronting, thanking. He is never alone and exalted, always on the same level as others, always engaged with them. His is a life of encounters, for as Martin Buber said, “All real living is meeting.” In Giotto’s fresco cycle, we meet a real saint in motion, living a real life on the same plane as everyone else. Each scene is enclosed within painted architectural elements—elaborately executed trompe l’oeil marble corbels—that enhance the impression of three-dimensionality, the impression that we are looking at these scenes through a series of open windows, leading us into another man’s life, allowing us to spy on him and gain some insight into his inner self. We have for so long been used to such depictions that it requires some concentration for us to appreciate again the thunderous revelation that these frescoes were in their time.

  Though it is not possible for us to linger here over each of the twenty-eight images, a closer look at four of them will give us sustenance for our continuing Giotto journey. The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, the scene in which Francis also renounces his father, is a fine example of Giotto’s democratic spirit, for all participants, even the distracted bishop, face one another on the same plane. The father’s punishing right arm is restrained discreetly by his neighbor, for violence is always muted in Giotto. The gulf between father and son is black, immense, and uncrossable, relieved only by Francis’s hands petitioning the dimly distant hand of God far above the town. All the figures are framed by the actual buildings of Assisi, domestic and secular on the left, public and sacred on the right—pink, yellow, white, and blue, demonstrations of Assisi’s pride in its mercantile adornments as against the nakedness of the humble saint.

  Dream of Innocent III by Giotto, Basilica of Saint Francis. (Photo Credit 6.12)


  In the Dream of Innocent III, the pope lies in his private chamber, the carefully detailed curtains that surround his sleeping alcove attesting to the reality of the scene (even if he is unlikely to have worn his pontifical robes and golden mitre to bed). He dreams that his cathedral church of San Giovanni in Laterano is falling down, held aloft only by the strength of the Little Poor Man of Assisi. It was because of this nightmare that Innocent resolved in the morning to give his approval to Francis’s peculiar experiment of the Lesser Brothers (or Friars Minor). The dramatic center of the scene is the stressed young face of Francis, all calm concentration and determination to succeed, his thick right wrist supporting the entire building.

  A personal favorite of mine is the Exorcism of the Demons of Arezzo, not so much for the demons (who, it must be admitted, are wonderfully individualized in their high dudgeon), nor even for Francis, kneeling humbly in prayer behind the official exorcist and giving the exorcism wings, as it were. What attracts me here is the detailed recital of Arezzo’s glorious architecture, caught as if in a freeze-frame, just as it was in Giotto’s day, rising in aspiration above the city’s walls, a colorful fantasy of medieval skyscrapers. Either the exorcism failed to rid the city of all its demons or they crept back sometime later (perhaps through the infernal cleft that spreads so ominously under the walls), for lovely Arezzo morphed into an enthusiastic center of Italian fascism in the 1930s, later serving Roberto Benigni as the setting for his comic and touching holocaust film, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful).