Devils Expelled from Arezzo

A raised hand reaches towards a city crowded with towers. Above the roofs, winged creatures twist through the air; below them, the walls and gateways remain standing. At the other side of the scene a church rises behind two brown-robed friars, one kneeling in prayer, the other standing to deliver a command. The Expulsion of the Devils from Arezzo makes a miracle visible through the relationship between these quiet figures and the restless shapes overhead. Its decisive action crosses an open stretch of sky.

This fresco is the tenth episode in the twenty-eight-scene life of Saint Francis painted in the Upper Church of the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi. ^[1] It belongs to the cycle traditionally associated with Giotto, whose authorship and chronology remain disputed. The basilica itself acknowledges the competing positions, including attribution to Giotto and to a Roman school of painting. ^[2] Within that larger debate, the Arezzo scene has a particularly clear identity: it tells how Francis, staying outside a city torn by internal conflict, sent Brother Silvester to drive away the demons stirring up its inhabitants.

The distinction between the two friars gives the picture its structure. Francis prays; Silvester speaks. Their different postures allow an action involving divine authority, a founder's instruction and a brother's obedience to be understood without showing a long conversation. Meanwhile, the city occupies so much of the painting that the welfare of an entire community becomes the subject of those individual acts.

The story behind the scene

The narrative comes from chapter VI, section 9 of Bonaventure's Major Legend of Saint Francis. Bonaventure describes Arezzo as shaken by civil war and threatened with destruction. Francis, lodging on its outskirts, sees demons rejoicing above the city and encouraging its angry citizens to kill one another. He sends Silvester to the gate with an instruction: invoke God and, through obedience, order the demons to depart. Silvester obeys, proclaiming the command aloud in God's name and at Francis's bidding. ^[3]

Bonaventure brings the outcome into ordinary civic life. Peace returns, and the citizens resume a lawful relationship with one another. In E. Gurney Salter's 1904 English translation, they begin peacefully to refashion their civil laws. The conclusion explains the miracle through Francis's humility and the power of humble obedience over the demons' arrogance. ^[3] The expulsion therefore concerns much more than removing frightening beings from a skyline. Its promised result is the recovery of a community's ability to live together.

This is a hagiographical account: a story shaped to reveal the saint's virtues and spiritual authority. It supplies the fresco's narrative and moral terms. It does not independently establish the presence of demons above medieval Arezzo, or identify a particular set of municipal reforms caused by Francis's intervention. Keeping that distinction clear makes the painting easier to understand. The demons express the cause of conflict as Bonaventure understands it; the buildings give that conflict a place and a human consequence.

The painting selects a compact moment from this sequence. Francis has already given his instruction, Silvester's gesture makes the spoken command intelligible, and the creatures' movement shows its effect. Several stages of the written story meet within one field. A viewer need not imagine the picture as a single instant caught by an eyewitness. It can display prayer, speech and response together, making their relationship the centre of attention.

Nor does the city need to be visibly wrecked to convey its peril. The masonry is substantial, the towers rise prominently and the gate remains usable. The threat described by Bonaventure is internal: citizens turning upon citizens. The fresco gives that danger an aerial form, then shows the disturbance being removed while the city survives.

Francis prays, Silvester commands

At the lower left, the haloed Francis bends close to the ground with his hands joined. His body forms a low, compact shape against the pale architecture behind him. Silvester stands nearer the centre, taller in the picture, with an arm lifted towards the city. His open gesture leads the eye upwards to the departing demons. These differences agree with both the narrative's division of responsibility and the familiar identification of the figures in the scene. ^{[1] [3]}

Francis kneels in prayer while Silvester raises his arm beside the church at Arezzo. Image source. Public domain. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The saint's position is especially telling. He is placed at the edge of the action, near the bottom of the church, yet his prayer underlies the command being carried out. Silvester has the more conspicuous silhouette: a broad sleeve, an extended arm and a face directed towards the troubled skyline. A quick glance could mistake the standing brother for Francis. Looking for the kneeling figure and his halo restores the picture's carefully divided agency.

There is also a difference in the space each figure addresses. Francis's bowed head and joined hands turn attention inwards towards prayer. Silvester's raised arm opens the scene outwards. His body mediates between the kneeling saint and the city, carrying the instruction across the intervening space. The picture can thus honour its founder while giving his companion a necessary, active role.

Bonaventure's emphasis on obedience helps explain why this delegation matters. Silvester is effective through carrying out an instruction in God's name. The brother's visible authority grows from his willingness to serve. Francis's humility and Silvester's obedience are complementary virtues, and the pair's different poses give those virtues distinct bodily forms. The story would lose much of its point if both friars were reduced to a single generic miracle worker.

Their shared brown habits also matter visually. Amid pale stone, coloured towers and a large blue field, the friars belong together through the simple masses of their clothing. The standing figure's gesture is easy to follow because the sleeve gives it weight. Francis's bent outline is equally readable against the church. The painter uses substantial bodies and clear silhouettes to make a spiritual relationship visible.

A city built for the story

Arezzo fills the right side with a dense arrangement of walls, houses and towers. Cream, yellow, reddish and cooler-toned buildings overlap, their roofs stepping upwards towards the upper edge. A high crenellated wall gathers this variety into a single urban enclosure. The eye moves from its broad foreground surface to the small windows, projecting structures and towers behind it, discovering a whole city within a compressed space. ^[1]

The contrast with the church on the left is immediate. The church is also large and elaborate, with a steeply capped bell tower, pointed openings and richly articulated stonework. But its architecture is presented as a relatively coherent mass. The city proliferates: one building gives way to another, with changes of height, colour and direction. Between them, the friars occupy a comparatively open area. Their uncluttered setting makes their action legible beside the crowded urban fabric.

This contrast can support a reading of spiritual order confronting civic disturbance. It need not make the church and city absolute opposites. The purpose of the miracle is to save the city and restore its common life. Its attractive, varied architecture gives that salvation a tangible object. There are homes and public spaces to preserve, gateways through which people should be able to pass, and a collective world extending beyond the two friars.

The gate is particularly important because Bonaventure locates Silvester's command there. In the painting, a small human presence within an opening brings the immense wall back to the scale of daily life. The disparity between that figure and the standing friar also shows how selectively the composition handles proportion. The city has enough depth to suggest enclosure and inhabited streets, while the holy figures remain large enough for their postures to be read clearly.

The ground adds another division. Broken, angular rock runs across the foreground in front of the city, contrasting with the area beneath the friars. This uneven terrain reinforces the sense of a boundary between their position and the fortified settlement. Yet Silvester's gesture passes over it effortlessly. Wall, rocky ground and open air become different kinds of space through which the command operates.

Such organisation asks to be read pictorially. The scene names Arezzo, but its buildings do not provide a measured survey of the medieval town. The isolated church, packed skyline, differing scales and dramatic ground serve the story's clarity. Identifying the church as a literal portrait of a particular cathedral would require further evidence beyond its prominence here. The architecture gives the narrative a convincing urban setting without obliging every tower or window to correspond to a surviving monument.

That freedom is part of the fresco's appeal. A wall turns enough for its side to be seen; towers rise where their silhouettes can register; a roof opens a path towards another building. The city seems full of possible routes and enclosed spaces even though the painter has made it small enough to fit beside the friars. Its density invites prolonged looking, then returns attention to the broad sweep of Silvester's arm.

The disturbance above the roofs

The demons occupy the upper right, where their irregular bodies interrupt the comparatively steady lines of the architecture. Wings, bent limbs and turning torsos set up a fluttering movement above the towers. Their forms vary, but the essential distinction is between these unsettled airborne shapes and the solid city beneath them. The fresco gives agitation a body and a location. ^[1]

The clustered roofs and walls of Arezzo, with departing devils above the city. Image source. Public domain. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

They are already in motion. Silvester does not grapple with them, and Francis's prayer does not require physical contact with the wall or its inhabitants. This distance makes the scene's account of authority especially economical. A gesture below has an answer above; the intervening air allows that response to be seen.

The high placement also follows Bonaventure's story, in which Francis perceives the demons rejoicing over the city. The painting gives visible form to what the saint discerns: forces inciting human violence. Its citizens remain a community capable of peace, and the creatures' departure opens the possibility of renewed cooperation. ^[3]

The skyline consequently carries two kinds of movement. Buildings lead the eye upwards in a succession of stable blocks, while the demons scatter across and above them. Once the creatures have gone, the towers will still be there. The promise of the miracle takes shape through this contrast between lasting habitation and passing disturbance.

Humility and the recovery of civic life

Bonaventure places the Arezzo episode in a chapter devoted to humility and obedience. Its moral logic depends on a reversal of expectations. A poor friar, staying beyond the city's walls, possesses an authority that its formidable enclosure cannot provide. His companion exercises that authority by obeying. The demons' arrogance is overcome through virtues expressed by the kneeling and standing brothers. ^[3]

The fortified architecture makes this argument concrete. The city has towers and gates, the material signs of an organised and defended settlement. Yet the danger in the story has arisen among its own inhabitants. A wall can mark who belongs inside, but common life also requires its members to restrain their hostility towards one another. Bonaventure's move from exorcism to civic peace connects a spiritual diagnosis with the practical need for lawful coexistence.

The fresco leaves much of that recovery for viewers to imagine. It does not spread a reconciliation ceremony across the foreground or show a new law being written. Instead, it concentrates on the action that makes renewed peace possible. The small people near the openings and the densely built city stand for a wider human world. The outcome reaches beyond the space that can be shown in detail.

Prayer also acquires a public consequence here. Francis remains outside the city, but the story makes his devotion effective within it. Silvester's position gives that relation an outward voice. The two figures together connect religious life with the welfare of neighbours, and the immense architectural setting keeps the civic scale of their intervention before the viewer.

Between the thrones and the sultan

Within the Assisi sequence, Arezzo follows the Vision of the Thrones and precedes the Trial by Fire before the Sultan. The paired narrative index identifies these as episodes nine, ten and eleven, while linking each to a different passage in Bonaventure. ^[23] Their order creates a useful progression through forms of authority: humility receives heavenly recognition, obedience addresses civic conflict, and Francis's mission takes him before a ruler abroad.

These remain distinct stories. In the vision, a companion learns of a throne reserved for humble Francis. At Arezzo, Silvester carries out the saint's command. Before the sultan, Francis proposes a trial by fire which, in Bonaventure's account, is not carried through. ^[23] The cycle's arrangement gives viewers connections to consider without turning its successive pictures into a diary of securely dated journeys.

Arezzo has a special place within that progression because the saint acts through another brother. Its drama depends on the capacity of the community he founded to transmit an instruction and make it effective. The composition keeps both men visible, letting prayer and delegated speech occupy the same scene. For the larger programme and its different painted settings, the Assisi frescoes provide the wider context.

An inherited arrangement, a disputed hand

The pairing of the two friars also enters the scholarly discussion of how the cycle was made. Michael Viktor Schwarz observes that the Arezzo painting reuses a figure arrangement from Cimabue's Fall of Simon Magus in the basilica's north transept, while transforming its manner of presentation. ^[24] The comparison is visible in the two compositions: low at the left, a kneeling holy figure accompanies a standing figure with an arm raised towards an event above. ^[25] In Cimabue's painting, a tall scaffold occupies the middle of the scene and a group gathers on the right. The Arezzo fresco opens the space beyond the raised arm and gives most of its right side to the city. A familiar arrangement carries a new story through changes in its surroundings.

That resemblance is a specific relationship between images. It does not by itself identify the individual who painted Arezzo. Schwarz considers it within a broader argument about painters drawing on earlier Assisi work, the upper biblical scenes and the art of Padua. His proposed campaign around 1308, involving either limited direction by Giotto or the transmission of his style by a former assistant, is a scholarly hypothesis. ^[24] Other reconstructions differ: Miklós Boskovits's 2001 account argues for a major role for the young Giotto in the Upper Church while recognising that the campaign and extent of his participation remain debated. ^[26]

The nave of the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi, photographed in 2010. The Francis cycle occupies the lower narrative register; its authorship remains disputed. The photograph records the wider setting rather than an isolated scene. Dennis G. Jarvis. Image source. CC BY-SA 2.0. Proportionally reduced reproduction; original composition, colour and photographic lighting retained.

The fresco rewards attention at a scale smaller than those large disagreements. Francis's joined hands, Silvester's lifted arm, the person at the gate and the creatures above the rooftops each hold a precise place in its account of peace restored. The city's crowded buildings remain the lasting object of the brothers' concern. Beneath the departing demons, a human community has room to continue its life.