Word: francesco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Written by Francesco Cavalli...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...