The Basilica of St Francis

Works by the Lorenzetti

Some frescoes, made by brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti around the 1330s, adorn the transept. The fragments are part of a cycle of frescoes devised for the chapter house and the friary cloister, and were detached from their place of origin and moved to the Basilica in 1857.
The third chapel to the left of the altar houses a Crucifixion by Pietro, framed by a nineteenth-century motif. The scene focuses on the upper part of the representation, converging on Christ and only portraying the onlookers half-length. The painting, made after their stay at the site of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, shows the same spatiality of the body and sense of expressiveness that characterize the Sienese artist’s later works. The pain is expressed by the swirling of the desperate angels, by Mary, who faints backwards and is supported by other women, by the hunched shoulders of young John, who manifests his despair in a grimace of pain. It is one of the highest and most dramatic works made by the Master, in which the accuracy with which the body of Christ is shaped recalls some of the sculptures made in Siena in that time by Giovanni Pisano.
On the other side of the transept, in the Bandini Piccolomini Chapel, are the paintings of Pietro’s brother Ambrogio, which depict St. Louis of Toulouse, who bids farewell to Boniface VIII, and the episode of the Martyrdom of the Franciscan friars in Marrakesh. The first scene narrates the story of Louis of Anjou, who gave up all claims to the kingdom of Naples in favour of his brother Robert in order to become a friar. In the painting a young Louis is wearing the Franciscan habit and is bowing to Pope Boniface who, like the others present, is in disbelief in front of such a decision. With this image, Ambrogio gives us a vivid picture of the society of that time, recounted in detail through the costumes and gestures that characterize the different figures.
The subject of the other painting is the story of the five monks sent by St. Francis to preach the Gospel of Christ to Muslims. Captured in Seville and taken to Marrakesh, they were cruelly tortured and ultimately beheaded on January 16th 1220, by order of the Leader of the Moors. It seems that when he learnt of the glorious martyr, Saint Francis exclaimed: “Now I can truly say I have five Friars Minor”. In 1481 the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV decided to canonize them and from that episode even Saint Anthony of Lisbon, known as St. Anthony of Padua, left the Order of Canons Regular to join the Friars Minor.