by Rachel Cusk
Francis began to spend his days alone, forlornly wandering in the countryside around the town. One day he came across a small church that lay in ruins and believed that he heard a voice telling him to repair it. More precisely, the voice is said to have ordered him to ‘repair my house which has fallen into ruin’. Another man might have acted on this injunction in the grand manner for which it appears to legislate, but Francis responded by selling some of his father’s cloth without permission and beginning restoration work on the little church with the proceeds. It is rare for the voice of God to initiate a direct attack on the property of the human father. It is as though Francis’s God were a projection of himself, a kind of universal victim ravaged by the world’s misunderstanding and neglect. Perhaps his spirit had been crushed after all, for like a child his sympathies ever after lay with dumb creatures, with the birds and bees whose patron saint he became. His father, Pietro, accused Francis of theft and led him before the bishop. Pietro explained the whole case, the wealth and education from which his son had profited, the ingratitude his increasingly strange behaviour evinced and the crime in which it had culminated, a crime the more outrageous for being perpetrated against his own father, to whom he owed everything, down to the clothes on his back. At this, Francis committed his final act of rejection: in front of the bishop he removed all of his clothes and gave them back to his father. What lengths he went to, both to goad and to free himself from his oppressive parent! To hand back your own clothes is the prelude to immolation itself, to the giving back of the body that has struggled to be free and failed. And Francis did go on to lead a life of great privation and denial, in which his interest in his new father and patriarch – God – seems to have been more than a little abstracted. His was a pure brand of nihilism that sought only to shield its most abject and defenceless victims from the evil of humankind. At the end of his life he instructed his followers to bury him at a place called Hell’s Hill, a bleak tract of land where executions were customarily held. His sufferings from tuberculosis were extreme, and it was during this final illness that he wrote the ‘Canticle of the Creatures’, a love poem to the unpopulated earth, to the sun and wind and water, to a dumb and beautiful Mother Nature whom he idolised for her impartiality, her lack of motive, her generosity that did not enslave, her abundance that was without cause or consequence.
Two years after Francis’s death in 1226, the cult of his celebrity was born. He was canonised, and the Pope laid the foundation stone for the basilica on his grave. He who had suffered so bitterly from the tyranny of identity, whose psyche found relief only in the dissolution of ownership and the casting off of material things, whose eyes dwelt for consolation on what was small and beneath notice, was to be pinioned for ever beneath the weight of a giant edifice of unparalleled splendour, in a place he had chosen for its lack of prestige, but which was henceforth to invoke the very origins of human aspiration itself and bear the name of Paradise Hill.
*
Reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, one begins to notice a minor consistency of an unexpected sort. The artists of the Renaissance, almost without exception, profited early in life from their fathers’ help in the recognition and exercise of their talents. Michelangelo, it is true, was occasionally beaten for spending his time drawing when he should have been studying, but by the time he was fourteen his father had changed his tune and apprenticed him at a living wage to the painter Ghirlandaio. But it is mostly the case that the child-artist, who in other eras was grudgingly received as a delinquent or an idiot, was in this time and place favoured and forwarded, soldered to the world by the paternalistic hand. And perhaps the psychic health of the art of the Renaissance, its confidence and sociability and insatiable love of humankind, issues from this prosaic and fundamental source.
Cimabue, born in 1240, whose works adorn the Basilica of St Francis, is credited by Vasari with being the artist who initiated the great restoration of the art of painting in Italy. At school he would cover his books with drawings instead of reading them: his parents congratulated him on his originality. When a group of Greek craftsmen was brought to Florence to decorate the Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Cimabue truanted school altogether and spent whole days watching them work. His father approached these craftsmen and elicited their agreement to take Cimabue on as an apprentice, for according to Vasari he had a great respect for his son and believed that his inclinations ought to be trusted. How different from poor St Francis, who only had to show an inclination for his father to move to crush it! And how different the pursuit of truth that followed, the one so punitive and painful and the other so vigorous and beautiful. Cimabue quickly became famous, so famous that when he painted a large new Madonna for Santa Maria Novella the painting was processed through the streets to the sound of trumpets and a cheering crowd. One day, he was walking in the countryside when he came across a young shepherd boy sitting in a field, drawing one of his own sheep with a pointed stone on a smooth piece of rock. This was Giotto. Cimabue was so astonished by his talent that he asked the boy to come and live with him, and the boy replied that if his father agreed, then he would. The father was delighted, and Giotto went back with Cimabue to Florence, where, as Vasari admits, he rapidly diminished Cimabue’s glory by becoming one of the greatest painters the world has ever known. Dante summed up the situation in The Divine Comedy:
Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field
In painting; Giotto’s all the rage today;
The other’s fame lies in the dust concealed.
It was in the Basilica di San Francesco that these first artists of the Renaissance evolved their artistic vision, for the edifice quickly grew so large that a certain blankness adhered to it, and adheres to it still. It is easy to enlarge the scale of a human construction: what is hard is to amplify its brain. The basilica was a dinosaur that needed to be rendered articulate. That was what the artists were for, to fill in its blankness, to program it with meaning and significance. The modest spirit of St Francis alone could not fill its barn-like spaces: it required the seasoning of art to flavour the bland atmosphere of pilgrimage.
Yet the modern-day pilgrims like their blandness, their plain fare. The basilica is full of them, passing the painted walls with barely a glance. The specifics of art are too strong for their palates. It is bones they have come for in their air-conditioned coaches; bones, and the experience of their own coming, their massing: the basic unit of life, entire unto itself, moving and massing together like polyps on the ocean bed. Held as they are in the unblinking stare of existence, interpretation and art do not concern them. The painted walls of the basilica are no more to them than the texture of the rock on which their colony has massed itself. Those walls are now faded and damaged with time: they have their own fame, their own divinity, but the pilgrims dislike people looking at paintings. They hiss and shush and send over angry stares. Now and then a message is broadcast over the sound system, reminding those who are not in the basilica to attend Mass that absolute silence is required or they will be asked to leave. Then the voice of the priest singing the liturgy issues from the crackling speakers once more, a sound that is both automatic and animal, like the loud call of some primitive creature whose interminable cadences now and again invite the unanimous caterwauling of his neighbours.
In the upper basilica there are a large number of frescoes depicting the life of St Francis. Until recently it was believed that Giotto had painted them, but my researches have informed me that it is now known that he did not. Nevertheless, his name remains there, in an engraved perspex rectangle on the basilica wall. Elsewhere in the basilica there are works by Cimabue, Simone Martini, Lorenzetti and the real Giotto, and none of them are labelled at all. They are difficult to find: they lie in sepulchral darkness among the vaults of the lower church, like prisoners in a dungeon. The customary modern appurtenances of the art lover are nowhere to be found. There are no lights, no silken tasselled ropes, no information. One is obstructed and put off the scent at
every opportunity. The broadcast warnings intensify: the shushing and the hostile stares come thick and fast through the gloom, for it is in the lower church that the bones lie, and the closer we get to them the more vigorously art is derided.
I begin to feel a little outraged. It is they who seem heretical to me, these spiritual bureaucrats with their rules and regulations, their monotonous chanting, their punitive demeanour and their threats of expulsion. It is they who are insolent: so quick to damn and shame, and glorying so in the execution of it. As a child I was accustomed to the way adults seized on Christianity as a tool, a moralising weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious: when they unsheathed it I would glimpse the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity, a place that seemed like a crack in the safe surface of the world; and it did appear to me that judgement lay down there, flowing like a black river within the tributaries of personalities, from a nameless common source. But now I found the Christian story all human, like literature: it was a long time since it had been raised as a weapon over my head. It is perhaps for exactly this reason that the pilgrims object to the Giotto-lovers. The whole place, I now see, has set itself against art as against a rival religion. A group of teenagers with clipboards murmur in front of Lorenzetti’s Madonna dei Tramonti and are instantly shot down with a volley of glares like a firing squad’s fusillade. A child asks a question of its parent concerning Giotto’s Flight into Egypt and is bludgeoned from all sides with disapproval. They are enraged, these people queuing to worship at the strange, sealed hexagonal tomb. Like Jesus, Francis was a misfit who has become an orthodoxy. But the Pharisee, it seems, was well drawn as an eternal human type. Of what, precisely, are we meant to feel ashamed? Is their faith so fragile, so impacted, that the whole world must be silent while it is teased out? They seem to disapprove so instinctively, as a hand gropes in the darkness for a switch. A little light comes on in their eyes: it reveals something, a sacred space in the brain that perhaps otherwise they would have had trouble finding their way to, with a bone lying in it on a little heap of dust.
In the right wing of the transept there is a famous painting of St Francis by Cimabue. He is small, hunched, unsmiling. He wears a monk’s tonsure and brown cassock and clutches a Bible in his hands. His eyes are large, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, of a light-brown colour: their expression is unutterably sad. It is not the sadness that shows in the rolling whites of a saint’s upturned, imploring gaze. It is a sadness that you see in the eyes of people who were unhappy children. His soft, full mouth trembles like a ripple in the surface of water. It is curious to see the paths of St Francis and Cimabue cross in this shadowy corner of the basilica. Cimabue painted a large number of frescoes in the upper and lower church alike, virtually none of which survive. He was reputed to be arrogant and perfectionistic, rejecting work that bore the slightest flaw in conception or technique. This was a new personality in the thirteenth-century world, this temperamental individualist. In those days a painter was a craftsman: the artist did not yet exist. The craftsman did not throw away work because it was less than perfect. He was the master of his materials, but he was not yet their author.
Cimabue couldn’t have cared less what his materials were worth, that much is clear. He could see something beyond himself and he made a path to it out of art. It was he who had to do it, for only he knew where his vision lay. And it had to be right, flawless, for what is the good of a path that doesn’t lead where it is meant to? In the painting of St Francis, the saint says, ‘I am nothing’; the artist says, ‘I am everything.’ Cimabue reinvented painting by reinventing the artist as visionary, as individualist, as risk-taker, as criminal and hero. And he restored to the painted human form its softness and mortality, its animal nature and the grandeur of its emotion. This was the old knowledge of the classical world, which the Christian story froze into a thousand-year hibernation. Now it was to be reborn as something new. Humanity had insisted that a link be forged between gods and mortals, but it was a long time before this new situation could be described: there were many rigid Madonnas to be painted, many stiff and gilded Annunciations, many primitive Nativities and stark Crucifixions before the connection could be made. Now the artist-individual could paint the subject-individual, the creature who contains everything – good and evil, truth and illusion, life and death – within himself. Now, at last, he could begin to capture reality.
*
There is a painting in the lower church by the unknown ‘Maestro di San Francesco’ of St Francis preaching to the birds. In its own way it is a masterpiece of characterisation, according the Franciscan vision the full measure of its eccentricity. It is as tragicomic as its subject, for what could better illustrate the analgesic nature of insanity than the belief that one is understood by birds? Virginia Woolf, in her bouts of madness, experienced this delusion, and there is a photograph by Cartier-Bresson of the painter Matisse in old age, sitting in a room full of empty birdcages. White doves have roosted on top of their open prison: Matisse holds one in his hands. He appears to be addressing it, for like Francis he cleaved to what was innocent and childlike, to the positivism of dumb nature. ‘I have always tried to hide my own efforts,’ he wrote, ‘and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost.’
Francis preaches to the birds and the birds listen respectfully, lined up in neat rows on the grass. Their little heads are attentive: their eyes are bright. Like children they look up, for Francis is much taller than they. Their tiny beaks are lifted and their wings are folded at their sides. And Francis, in his cassock, speaks on, a tutelary finger raised, like a gentle lunatic in a public park. Upstairs there is a frescoed image of the moment he returned his clothes to his father in front of the bishop. It occurs to me that it is not for his godliness alone that the pilgrims come to worship Francis. His story, born as it is out of human psychology, is emblematic of the same consciousness that was simultaneously struggling to express itself in art. I am nothing; I am everything. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims shush and glare at us for the same reason that we roll our eyes at them. It is the rise of the personal we are reverencing, in its different forms. It is meaning we have come for, of one sort or another. But most of all it is sympathy, sympathy that we want and must have, only sympathy, from bones or from paint.
*
We go out into the grey, heavy afternoon. The basilica stands at the foot of the town, on a jutting peninsula of land where the earth falls away to all sides. Below it lies the plain, sinking into its own flat eternity like a separate element, so that from above there is the feeling of terminus, of the sea seen from the last cliffs that are the boundary of the habitable world. We walk away from it, up into the cobbled streets that twist and turn uphill. A small, hard rain begins to fall, dashed down in handfuls. Every now and then a monk passes by, impervious to the water. They wear immaculate cassocks and sandals with belts of rope swinging at their waists; they beam at everyone they see. They look like extras on a film set, walking the antique streets beneath the artificial rain in their unblemished costumes. We have lunch in a restaurant, gnocchi made by a chef who stands only a few feet away behind his little hatch and beams at us too while we eat. The children want to buy a souvenir. We stand in a shop and look at nightlights made of moulded plastic, which show the Virgin encased in a plastic grotto that lights up pink when it is switched on. There are T-shirts and table mats and baseball caps, aprons and napkin rings and plastic pens, figurines and frisbees and extravagant embroidered wall hangings, all bearing an image of St Francis of Assisi. It is not Cimabue’s image: it is a computerised logo, a brand. There are expensive porcelain statues, too, about ten inches high, that depict him among the animals: birds have alighted on his hands, a deer rests at his feet, a lamb lies across his shoulders. The statues are entirely white: his monkish garment looks like a Grecian robe, falling in long milk-white folds to his feet.
I myself had exactly this statue as a child
. I was given it on the occasion of my First Communion. It seems strange to me that they should still be producing it, all this time later, so closely did I identify it with a phase of my own life. For years it stood on the mantelpiece of my bedroom, along with a blue china plaque bearing a relief of the Virgin Mary in a wreath of china flowers. The plaque is also for sale in the souvenir shop in Assisi. After I had left home these things remained in my room in my parents’ house, but then several years ago my mother gave them back to me: I was grown up, and had a house of my own to put them in. I didn’t want them, for I never felt that they were actually mine, and their presence in this shop seems to prove it. There was something unsavoury about them, something threatening: a sterility or morbidity, like the funerary displays in an undertaker’s window. There they had stood on my childhood mantelpiece and though I never really looked at them their purity was dreadful and frightening to me, for it was clear that these were children’s ornaments and when I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye I saw children’s graves. This was how the pill of religion was always forced down, with flavours too bitter and too sweet to mask one another. But I took the statue and the plaque back anyway, feeling that I should. When I opened the box again, all those years later, that flavour rose out in all its potency. I remembered how deeply the feeling of sterility had impressed itself on me, the feeling of Sunday, of nuns in their habits, of old bones, of disapproval and shame and of everything that could have no further issue, no continuance, in this world or the next. It all seemed to be paving the way not to heaven, nor even to hell, but to absolute and final nothingness.