Canonisation of Saint Francis

The Canonisation of Saint Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi represents a public act of recognition. Gregory IX has come to the saint’s own city to proclaim him a saint, before an assembly of churchmen and other witnesses. Yet the fresco’s most immediately striking feature today is the unevenness of its survival. The crowd remains densely present along the lower edge and on the right; above and to the left, great stretches of the ceremony have become difficult or impossible to read. We can still follow the gathering of people around an authoritative event without being able to recover every participant or gesture. ^[1]

This is the twenty-fourth episode in the twenty-eight-scene Franciscan cycle traditionally associated with Giotto. Both the authorship and the dating of that cycle remain disputed. Even the basilica’s own account acknowledges the division between scholars who attribute it to Giotto and those who favour a Roman school. The painting belongs within that discussion, rather than providing a securely documented example of one individual painter’s hand. ^[2] Its subject, however, is firmly identified: Francis’s canonisation at Assisi on 16 July 1228, as narrated in chapter XV.7 of Bonaventure’s Major Legend. ^[3]

What Gregory IX proclaims

Bonaventure gives the ceremony a carefully prepared foundation. After Francis’s death, reports of miracles spread, encouraging devotion and bringing news of his reputation to Gregory IX. The pope, in this telling, already possesses personal knowledge of Francis’s holiness. Nevertheless, conviction must acquire a form that can be communicated to the wider Church. Gregory orders accounts of the miracles to be written down, supported by trustworthy witnesses and examined by cardinals. Bonaventure adds a pointed detail: the examiners are those who appear least favourable to the cause. Their approval helps present the decision as something tested as well as cherished. ^[3]

An oral reputation becomes written testimony; testimony undergoes examination; agreement among cardinals and other prelates leads to a decree. Gregory then travels personally to Assisi and, amid solemn ceremonies on 16 July 1228, enrols Francis among the saints. The fresco concentrates this extended process into an assembly. Its visible bodies give a public dimension to the action whose preliminary paperwork Bonaventure describes.

That correspondence should not turn the picture into an illustration of surviving inquiry minutes. Bonaventure writes a saint’s life, constructing an account of holiness recognised on earth because it has already been manifested by God. His description of scrutiny is part of that argument. It supplies the narrative framework for understanding the fresco, while leaving questions about the historical investigation to other kinds of evidence. Nor can each surviving face be matched to one of the witnesses or examiners in his text. The crowd is essential to the meaning without becoming a recoverable list of named participants.

The event also needs separating from the later movement of Francis’s remains. In the following section, XV.8, Bonaventure dates the transfer of the body to the church built in his honour to 25 May 1230, during a gathering of the brothers for a general chapter. ^[23] That is a different occasion. The Canonisation concerns the declaration of sainthood in 1228. Reading it as the burial or the installation of the body in the new basilica would collapse two distinct moments in the making of Francis’s public memory.

Francis’s body and its resting place are central elsewhere in the concluding scenes. Here attention shifts towards the authority to recognise and proclaim his sanctity. People assemble, churchmen preside, and the decision becomes a public act. In Bonaventure’s terms, the proclamation makes known on earth a glory that already exists in heaven.

The gathering that survives

A large roofed structure occupies much of the left and central field. Its surviving horizontal beams and upright supports remain emphatic, even where the painting they enclose is badly depleted. The strong rectangular construction contrasts with the clustered heads beside and beneath it. At the front, a pale cloth covers the top of an altar, with narrow upright fittings rising around it. These comparatively clear edges give the lower centre a stable geometry against which the people gather. ^[1]

The surviving clergy and lower audience at the right of the damaged Canonisation fresco. Image source. Public domain. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The architecture establishes a place for ceremony, but its fragmentary condition limits a fuller reconstruction. We should not turn every discoloured or empty area into a curtain, a wall or a vanished ceremonial object. What remains is enough to suggest an organised distinction between the space of the officiants and that of those who have come to witness the act. The painted structure gives height and definition to the occasion; the altar places it within a sacred setting.

The right-hand assembly is particularly revealing. Mitred churchmen sit above the foreground audience, their larger, more exposed bodies contrasting with the heads packed below. Pale vestments, red mantles and the angled forms of the mitres break up the group. Even here, survival varies from one figure to the next. Some faces and folds are readable, while neighbouring bodies have lost much of their definition. A description of the whole ceremony must accommodate that broken continuity.

The foreground crowd supplies another register of attention. Light-coloured caps or hoods create a succession of small rounded shapes, interrupted by uncovered faces and darker clothing. Several figures turn towards the ceremonial area to the left. A raised hand near the centre of the lower group introduces a gesture among the many heads. Farther left, under the structure, a standing figure in a muted reddish garment lifts a hand at chest height. These surviving movements help the picture remain an event, rather than a simple row of people assembled for a portrait.

Overlap creates the sense of numbers. Bodies disappear behind nearer shoulders; faces emerge in the intervals between other heads; the crowd reaches to the edges of the field. At the lower left, a small figure seen from behind stands close to the altar, framed by the much taller people nearby. On the right, the spectators’ shoulders form a succession of dark, rounded masses beneath the lighter heads. The eye moves between these differences of scale and position, following the gathering without finding a single privileged spectator.

Height contributes to that effect. The seated clergy occupy a higher level than the closest spectators, while other heads rise behind them. At the left, the canopy extends far above the people sheltered beneath it. The painting therefore combines a broad human gathering with clear differences in position. Recognition is collective, but the authority to pronounce it has a particular place within the assembly.

The surviving paint does not permit an equally confident account of the pope himself. The subject tells us that Gregory IX is the central historical actor; it cannot restore his original facial expression or the complete disposition of his figure. Assigning him a tender smile, a commanding gaze or a precisely reconstructed gesture would supply an imaginative completion. Here the distinction between knowing the story and seeing the painting is especially consequential.

From farewell to recognised sainthood

The preceding episode, the Mourning of the Poor Clares, brings Francis’s body before Clare and her sisters at San Damiano. Bonaventure describes a pause during the procession to Assisi, allowing them to see and embrace him before his first burial at San Giorgio. ^[24] Its intimacy has a communal setting, yet its centre is the encounter between the dead founder and the women whose religious life was closely connected with his.

Canonisation changes the terms of that encounter. The assembled living now bear witness to a formal declaration about the dead. The transition gives the closing sequence a wider reach: the body mourned and venerated becomes the focus of an officially recognised cult. The fresco’s crowded assembly makes that expansion visible. Its subject concerns the relationship between a particular life and the Church that will preserve and celebrate its memory.

The next scene, the Apparition to Pope Gregory IX, makes the sequence more complex than a succession of dates. In Bonaventure’s account of posthumous miracles, Gregory doubts the wound in Francis’s side before enrolling him among the saints. Francis appears in a dream, reveals the wound and asks for a vessel to receive the blood. The dream persuades the pope of the truth of the stigmata. ^[25] Although that episode follows canonisation on the wall, its narrative time precedes the proclamation.

The juxtaposition allows public recognition and personal conviction to illuminate each other. The Canonisation presents an assembly and an authoritative act. Gregory’s dream presents an individual recipient of a vision concerning Francis’s body. Together they return to a question running through the posthumous stories: how is sanctity made credible to those who did not share every moment of the saint’s life?

Bonaventure answers through different kinds of testimony, including sight, touch, reported miracles, examination and revelation. The paintings give these forms distinct settings. For a viewer moving through the Assisi frescoes, the change from a crowd to a dreamer can sharpen the distinction between a proclamation heard by many and a vision experienced by one. The painted order builds an argument about recognition while drawing on events that do not all unfold in the same chronological sequence.

A crowd within a disputed painting campaign

The gathering also has a place in scholarly attempts to understand how the cycle was made. Michael Viktor Schwarz includes the Canonisation among the later crowd scenes that he associates with a different artistic campaign from the one responsible for much of the earlier sequence. His argument develops a distinction between groups of painters and their approaches to figures, space and massed assemblies. It is an interpretation of the cycle’s production, with consequences for its chronology; it is not an agreed assignment of this fresco to a named assistant. ^[26]

Schwarz also discusses a more specific comparison involving a child’s head in the Canonisation and the Christ Child in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Monticchiello Madonna. Reporting Margrit Lisner’s comparison, he disputes the direction in which the model travelled, proposing the use of Lorenzettian workshop patterns at Assisi. ^[26] Such a disagreement shows why a resemblance cannot by itself settle a date or an author. Shared facial types may enter competing reconstructions of artistic contact.

For this damaged scene, the crowd’s organisation remains easier to apprehend than the complete modelling of every head. The assembly is built through levels, overlaps and differences of costume. Those features can be studied while keeping individual hand assignments open. A viewer need not choose a definitive attribution before noticing how the picture makes an act of papal authority depend visually on the presence of a gathered community.

Looking without filling the gaps

Giuseppe Basile singled out the Canonisation when discussing hypothetical restitutions of the Franciscan cycle. The missing area was so extensive, he observed, that reconstruction could offer no alternative to invention. His account distinguishes conservation of original wall painting from Fabio Fernetti’s interpretative reconstructions, which used surviving traces and the study of altered surfaces. Such images could explore lost appearance, but they were separate from treatment of the original fresco. Basile’s discussion of the 1997 earthquake also concerns collapsed areas of the vault; it does not mean that the entire Franciscan wall cycle was destroyed. ^[27]

The limits are evident in this scene’s unequal visibility. A spectator’s face may remain articulate while a nearby figure dissolves into an indistinct patch. A beam continues across a stretch where the activity below it has almost disappeared. These differences change the pace of looking: the eye follows what survives and pauses where it cannot proceed. Missing paint is part of the object’s present experience, even though it was never part of the intended ceremony.

Enough remains to understand the central transformation. A holy man’s reputation, carried by testimony and devotion, is proclaimed before an assembly. The canopy, altar, seated churchmen and crowded witnesses give that act a tangible social setting. The fresco asks us to see recognition taking public form; its damaged surface asks us to distinguish the force of that surviving idea from details that can no longer be recovered.