From Assisi's Treasury

By ROBERT HUGHES

The holy and frugal St. Francis believed that his order of monks ought to survive by begging. In a way, this pious tradition is preserved by a show that is now on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi" comprises some 70 works of art--paintings, sculpture, textiles, manuscripts and metalwork--drawn in part from the 13th century tesoro, or museum, of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, Italy. Its main purpose is to draw attention to the disaster that struck the great pilgrimage center in September 1997, when an earthquake shook loose the vaults of its upper church, weakening the whole structure and bringing down some 2,000 sq. ft. of frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto in a ruin of colored plaster-dust and tens of thousands of jigsaw-puzzle fragments.

This was the worst catastrophe to afflict the fragile patrimony of Italian art history since the 1966 flood in Florence, but the Italian church and civil authorities rashly promised to have the basilica restored and open to the public again in time for Christmas 1999. The restoration cost was estimated at $60 million--the price, more or less, of a single Van Gogh, but not easy to raise. The aim of this show, then, is to remind the public of the Assisi disaster and of the urgency of its repair.

From the time it was founded in 1228, right after the canonization of St. Francis, the great basilica was showered with gifts of liturgical art. One may well ask how an order dedicated to holy poverty managed to raise the money to construct the basilica, fill it with frescoes and altarpieces by the most esteemed and expensive artists of the 13th century, and acquire the rich collection of chalices, reliquaries and the like that plumped out its treasure house--in sum, to turn the place into the biggest pilgrimage center in the late medieval world, after Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela.

It wasn't done by monks rattling tin cups on street corners. Gregory IX, the Pope who canonized St. Francis, wanted to establish San Francesco partly for religious reasons and partly for political ones--Assisi, which had been wrested from the Holy Roman Emperor only some 20 years before, was the major power base for the papacy in central Italy. He took the sanctuary under his ample wing, supplying the land and encouraging donations to it. Later Popes sometimes took up residence there.

San Francesco was, in effect, papal property, and this carried implications that the high and mighty of Europe could hardly ignore. Gifts to San Francesco were gifts to the papacy as well as to the memory of St. Francis, and they poured in from all over Christendom: vestments made by Arabic textile masters in Palermo and presented by the crusader King of Jerusalem; illuminated manuscripts from Louis IX, King of France (and later a saint himself); sumptuous tokens from the rulers of England, Germany and Spain, as well as the various lay and ecclesiastical bigwigs of Italy and the successive Popes themselves. The last person to leave a big gift of medieval Italian art to San Francesco was, oddly enough, a 20th century American who died in 1955--the collector-dealer Frederick Mason Perkins, a friend of Bernard Berenson's.

But things also went out. From the 14th to the 19th centuries, the tesoro was regularly pillaged--in riots, civil wars, revolutions and invasions. During the decline of the Franciscan order, the monks themselves were not above alleviating their holy poverty by doing a little de-accessioning. They were apparently following their founder's injunction by selling what they had and giving the proceeds to the poor (themselves). All in all, what remains of the basilican treasury is only a fragment of its earlier glories. So one should not, perhaps, expect too much from this show. In any case, it bears only the slightest proportional relation to the bewildering and dense variety of works of art that are to be seen in the whole fabric of San Francesco--about the same ratio, you might say, that a crumb of saint's bone in one of its reliquaries does to the whole body.

Nevertheless, the show--which will be at the Met through June 27 and then move to San Francisco, appropriately enough, for the summer--has some exceptional things in it. Perhaps the finest of its paintings, and the most exuberantly fresh in its coloring, is a portion of what must have been one of the great 13th century Italian altarpieces. It is the work of an unidentified Umbrian artist known only as the Master of St. Francis, and it shows a decided breakaway from Byzantine conventions in the modeling of its figures. In its scene of Christ's deposition from the Cross, the figure of the Saviour bends into an extraordinary U of anguish, pathetic but tense, as though he were about to spring back into life.

Of almost equal quality is a very early panel depicting a tonsured, hollow-cheeked and rather minatory St. Francis, holding a cross and an open New Testament and exhibiting the stigmata on his hands and feet, standing ramrod-straight and flanked by four scenes of his posthumous miracles. It was done by an unknown artist, either an Italian or a Byzantine Greek, in the second third of the 13th century. It looks stiff and archaic, yet the painter has infused a remarkable energy into some of its details, such as the calligraphic loops on the blue robe of a madwoman from whose mouth an exorcised devil is escaping.

There is a lot of work in precious metals--reliquaries, chalices and other kinds of liturgical equipment. The reliquaries were done at the highest pitch of craft, mostly by goldsmiths whose names have not survived. A modern eye is more apt to enjoy the spectacle of the concentrated, disciplined labor that went into building a tiny sarcophagus out of gold and rock crystal to house a brown bit of human tissue that may or may not have been part of St. Vitus, or a supposed rag off the "seamless robe" worn by Christ at his Crucifixion. Seven hundred years ago, of course, it was the relic itself that really counted, that was "precious" and "unique"; the roles of container and content have reversed.

The single most dazzling object in the show is neither a reliquary nor a painting, nor even a manuscript illumination. It is the chalice made by the Sienese goldsmith Guccio di Mannaia, presented to the Franciscans by Pope Nicholas IV in the late 13th century. In design and workmanship it is more than a masterpiece--it's one of the greatest monuments of medieval art, standing only a little more than nine inches high. Its base, stem and bulb are decorated with some 80 tiny and exquisitely made enamel-glass plaques, representing mythical beasts, evangelists, angels, prophets and apostles. The gold surface between them carries a rich linear ornamentation that never gets congested. The silver-gilt cup, borne up on the stem, is quite plain: it shifts visual gear from the "worldly" solidity of the base to an abstract purity that seems transcendent. If you wanted a container for the blood of Jesus, it would be impossible to imagine a more fitting one than this.