From Assisi's Treasury

The holy and frugal St. Francis believed that his order of monks ought to survive by begging. In a way, this pious tradition is preserved by a 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 and Giotto in a ruin of colored plaster-dust and tens of thousands of jigsaw-puzzle fragments.

This was the worst catastrophe to afflict the fragile patrimony of Italian art history since the 1966 flood in Florence, but the Italian church and civil authorities rashly promised to have the basilica restored and open to the public again in time for Christmas 1999. The restoration cost was estimated at $60 million--the price, more or less, of a single Van Gogh, but not easy to raise. The aim of this show, then, is to remind the public of the Assisi disaster and of the urgency of its repair.

From the time it was founded in 1228, right after the canonization of St. Francis, the great basilica was showered with gifts of liturgical art. One may well ask how an order dedicated to holy poverty managed to raise the money to construct the basilica, fill it with frescoes and altarpieces by the most esteemed and expensive artists of the 13th century, and acquire the rich collection of chalices, reliquaries and the like that plumped out its treasure house--in sum, to turn the place into the biggest pilgrimage center in the late medieval world, after Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela.

It 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.

San 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 themselves. The last person to leave a big gift of medieval Italian art to San Francesco was, oddly enough, a 20th century American who died in 1955--the collector-dealer Frederick Mason Perkins, a friend of Bernard Berenson's.