Cimabue's Santa Maria Degli Angeli at Assisi

Chapter 11 Cimabue’s Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi

Holly Flora

By the thirteenth century, Marian devotion was at the heart of Christian worship throughout Europe. But St. Francis of Assisi expressed a particular love for Mary, one that shaped his own religious formation as well as his creation of the Franciscan Order. Francis’ special connection to Mary was also expressed via a sacred locus. Prior to his conversion to the spiritual life, Francis received his famous vision in the church of San Damiano where the crucifix spoke to him, asking him to ‘rebuild my church.’ Taking these words literally, Francis then began restoring the dilapidated San Damiano as well as the little church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in the foothills outside Assisi. As Bonaventure re- counts in the Legenda maior, ‘When the man of God saw it so abandoned, he began to stay there regularly in order to repair it, moved by the warm devotion he had toward the Lady of the world.’1 Santa Maria degli Angeli became the first place of residence for the early friars, who set up simple huts surrounding the church on a piece of land known as the Porziuncola, or ‘little portion.’2 It was there also that Francis prayed that Mary might become the friars’ particular champion, ‘In the church of the Virgin Mother of God, her servant Francis lin- gered, and with continuing cries begged her who had conceived and brought to birth the Word full of grace and truth to become his Advocate.’3 As Francis’ biographers attest, the connections between Mary and the Franciscan Order are thus deeply rooted in the Order’s early history at Santa Maria degli Angeli. Given Francis’ evident fondness for Mary, it comes as no surprise that a medieval Marian image is one of the most celebrated images in Assisi today: The Madonna and Child with Saint Francis (Figure 11.1) by the Florentine artist Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue (ca. 1240–1302).

1 For the hagiography of Francis, I rely here principally on Bonaventure’s biography of Francis, which became the only official account of the saint’s life in 1266 and would have been well known to the friars in Assisi at the time Cimabue was painting. See Bonaventure, The Major Legend of Saint Francis, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder, trans. and ed. Regis J. Armstrong, ofm Cap., J.A. Wayne Hellmann, ofm Conv., and William J. Short, ofm (hereafter cited as faed 2), 540. 2 On the significance of the Porziuncola to the early friars, see Xavier Seubert, ‘Die Liebligkeit deß Paradeys-Hügls,’ in Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trinita Kennedy et. al, (Nashville, 2014), catalogue 1, 92–93. 3 Bonaventure, Major Legend, faed 2, 542.

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Painted in the north transept of the Lower Church of St. Francis at the end of the thirteenth century, Cimabue’s fresco depicts the Virgin with the Christ Child on her lap, seated on a throne. Celebrated as an example of Cimabue’s early Renaissance experiments in perspectival effects, the throne is angled obliquely to the picture plane in an effort at the illusion of its recession into space. Painted as though fashioned from intricately lathed wood and draped with a luxurious brocade cloth of honor on its back, the throne presents the re- gal Virgin as she rests on a plump cushion. She holds the blessing infant Christ on her lap while four angels accompany her, standing in pairs on either side of the throne. At the viewer’s right, separated slightly from the Madonna, a figure of Francis stands holding a book. His hands and feet display the wounds of the stigmata, and his tunic is torn open to reveal the wound in his side. Cimabue’s fresco has become an emblem of Franciscan devotion for tour- ists and pilgrims, reproduced thousands of times on trinkets and postcards in souvenir shops. The Madonna’s status as a favored image seems to have been established quite early, for it was spared in the early fourteenth century when

Figure 11.1 Cimabue, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint Francis, Lower Church, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi. Photo: © Stefan Diller Photographie, Werbung Industrie Portraits, permission to use granted 4 April 2018

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