San Francesco, tra Cimabue e Perugino. Nel Giubileo con il Cantico delle Creature

A project dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of Italy, to celebrate the beginning of the Jubilee Year and the eighth centenary of the Canticle of the Creatures. Promoted by the Italian Senate in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and the National Gallery of Umbria, the exhibition hosted at Palazzo della Minerva, home of the Giovanni Spadolini Senate Library, concisely but effectively recounts the development of the saint’s iconography between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, highlighting his role in the definition of Italian national identity.

The exhibition benefits from two exceptional loans. The Sacro Convento of St. Francis in Assisi has granted the Chartula, a rare fragment of parchment with an autograph text by St. Francis datable to 1224 and still clearly legible, preserved in the lower church of the Basilica of Assisi. From the Museum of the Portiuncula comes another masterpiece with an intense spiritual identity: the effigy of the saint painted by Cimabue during the years in which he was busy frescoing the Basilica of Assisi, using as a support the panel that, according to tradition, had served as a cover for the first very humble wooden box in which Francis’ body was buried immediately after his death (1226).

The exhibition starts with these sacred objects and continues with works by some of the greatest painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Perugino, Benozzo Gozzoli, Taddeo di Bartolo, Niccolò di Liberatore, in an evocative narration aimed at restoring the evolution of the image of the saint in parallel with the ever-growing affirmation of the Franciscan cult.