(piano music)
- [Voiceover] When we think about the great tradition
of religious painting in the West,
the great Christian tradition,
we often think of painting on panels.
But where did that begin?
- [Voiceover] We begin to really see painting
in the West in the 12th and 13th centuries.
- [Voiceover] And one of the most famous examples of this
is an altarpiece by Bonaventura Berlinghieri,
known as the St. Francis Altarpiece.
- [Voiceover] This is a life-sized altarpiece,
so Francis is about five feet high.
It would have stood on an altar
and would have been the focus
of religious meditation, of prayer.
- [Voiceover] And although the depiction
of the figure of Francis is a common height,
this is not a naturalistic depiction.
- [Voiceover] And that's part of the point,
is this is within 10 years of Francis's
death and canonization.
He's just been made a saint,
and so part of the purpose of this image
is for his followers to show his saintliness,
the miracles that he performed,
to depict him as a person who is blessed by God.
- [Voiceover] So who was Francis?
He'd been born into a prosperous family,
but as a young man, he had had some kind of
intense religious vision,
and he renounced his worldly possessions.
According to some stories,
he actually took the fine clothes off his back
and threw them back at his father.
- [Voiceover] So what was important
for Francis and for his followers was to
live a life of poverty, to follow the example of Christ.
Now the Franciscans, the order that
comes from Francis's teaching,
was a mendicant order, they lived by begging,
and they lived in the relatively new cities
that existed in Italy.
- [Voiceover] This was a moment of transition
between this period that we know as
the medieval or the Middle Ages,
and what will eventually become the Renaissance.
- [Voiceover] And in the new cities in Italy
and elsewhere in Europe, we have the beginning
of a merchant class, the beginning of
an accumulation of wealth which will help
to power the Renaissance.
So what are we learning about Francis
when we look at Berlinghieri's altarpiece?
We're convinced of his spirituality.
He is placed within this gold background,
this gold leaf that's been applied to the wood
that is the support for the altarpiece.
- [Voiceover] And this is the light of heaven,
Very much in the medieval tradition,
the artist has been perfectly happy to distort
the proportions of the body, lengthening him.
- [Voiceover] Not only is he elongated,
but he seems to almost float about the ground.
There's a weightlessness to him.
The brown drape that he wears,
that's adopted by the monks in his order,
hides his body underneath.
We don't have an interest in the human body.
This is not a man of the body,
that we're seeing Francis as spirit here.
- [Voiceover] You know, that brown robe
and the simple belt made out of rope
and the fact that he's not wearing any shoes,
he's barefoot, all of these things
are symbols of his humbleness in the world,
of the way in which he renounced the world's wealth,
the world's pleasures, to live a life
that was as close to Christ's as possible.
And what he's showing us as he lifts his hand
and exposes his palm is the stigmata.
- [Voiceover] These are wounds that Christ received
on the cross that are appearing miraculously
on the body of Francis.
And you can tell that it was important to the monks,
the Franciscans, who commissioned this altarpiece,
and this is the earliest dated Franciscan altarpiece,
but you can tell that it was important to the monks
to highlight the stigmata, this incredible miracle
that Francis received.
But there are lots of things about Francis's life
that made him very popular.
- [Voiceover] And we can see those things
depicted in the apron scenes that surround
the central figure of Francis.
If we start in the upper left,
you see St. Francis kneeling in the wilderness.
This is a very schematic representation,
very much in this late medieval style.
You can see that he's looking up and praying
to the seraphim, that is, this angelic figure,
and it is at this moment that Francis
has this vision and then receives the stigmata.
Below, we see a very important moment
for Francis's followers, and this is
Francis preaching to the birds,
so this idea of preaching to the lowliest creatures
resonated with Francis's message of preaching to the poor.
- [Voiceover] It's important to note that
the Franciscans and the other mendicant orders
would often build churches on the outskirts of cities
in order to reach the poor that lived
not in the city center but at its edges.
I love the representation of the preaching to the birds,
and I love especially that small little mountain
that is this landscape, this stand-in for nature,
but it's so stylized.
Now the four remaining apron scenes
are all representations of posthumous miracles,
that is, miracles that were associated
with Francis after his death,
and they have to do largely with healing the disabled,
or in the case of this scene at the bottom right,
of a exorcism over moving of demons.
- [Voiceover] And those scenes where we see
St. Francis healing are meant to
help identify him with Christ and the apostles,
and thereby also to convince us
of his saintliness, his holiness.
- [Voiceover] This is a painting that really does
express a divine authority.
- [Voiceover] In the early 13th century,
Byzantine icons, that is, images of the Madonna,
images of saints in a flat gold background,
increasingly came to Italy and influenced
artists there like Berlinghieri.
The Byzantine influence is in
the elongation of the figure, its flatness,
and in that gold background.
Here we're seeing many elements
that are typical of the Byzantine figures
that are frontal, weightless, elongated,
that gold light of heaven.
In less than a century with Giotto,
we're going to see an interest in human beings
who are in much more natural proportions,
a renewed interest in a realistic, believable,
earthly setting for figures,
but it's fascinating to see this early moment
in Italian painting and the influence
of the Byzantine empire.
(piano music)