Homage of Simple Man

A pale cloak stretches across the ground between two people. At the left, the young Francis lowers his head towards a man crouching at the right, who holds the garment's edge and spreads it beneath his feet. Behind them rises a columned building, so prominent that the human encounter can seem, at first, almost incidental to the architecture. Following the cloth across the foreground brings the subject into focus: someone has recognised a future greatness that the rest of the square has yet to understand.

Homage of a Simple Man opens the twenty-eight scenes of the life and miracles of Saint Francis in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. Traditionally associated with Giotto and his collaborators, the cycle remains the subject of substantial disagreement over authorship and execution. This first episode has a particularly interesting place in that discussion: its position at the beginning of Francis's story does not establish that it was painted first. ^[1]

The action belongs to Francis's youth, before his decisive abandonment of worldly ambitions. The man on the ground is an unnamed citizen of Assisi, and the cloak is his own. Francis is receiving an extraordinary gesture of respect. In the next painting, he will become the giver of a different garment. Here, the drama rests on the distance between an obscure man's recognition and the honour that the saint will receive in the future. ^[2]

The citizen who sees ahead

Bonaventure tells the story in the first section of the Major Legend, his life of Francis. He introduces a young man engaged in mercantile business, living among worldly distractions, yet already distinguished by generosity and compassion for poor people. Francis once turns away someone asking for alms while he is busy trading; afterwards, remembering the request, he runs after the man and gives him assistance. Bonaventure makes this an early indication of a charitable disposition that will grow into a much larger vocation. ^[2]

The account of the citizen follows within this description of Francis's youth. Whenever the man met Francis passing through the city, he removed his cloak and laid it before his feet. He declared that Francis deserved honour because he would soon accomplish great things and be honoured by the faithful. Bonaventure describes him as someone regarded as a simpleton, while giving his insight a divine origin. The title Homage of a Simple Man preserves that contrast between the man's low standing in other people's estimation and the authority the narrative grants his words. ^[2]

The source supplies neither a personal name nor an occupation. Its description should be understood as part of a religious story about unexpected insight; it offers no grounds for a modern medical diagnosis. Within Bonaventure's account, a person whom others underestimate becomes the first public herald of Francis's future significance. His outwardly humble action carries a claim that exceeds the judgment of those around him.

Bonaventure also describes a repeated practice: the citizen acts whenever he encounters Francis. The fresco gathers that repetition into one legible moment. A single stretch of cloth, a bowed head and the meeting of two gazes stand for the larger prediction. We can see what the man does even before learning what he says. Understanding the text then changes the action from an unusual street encounter into the opening announcement of a saint's life.

This is hagiography, a narrative written to disclose sanctity and providential purpose. It explains the fresco's subject and the significance attached to it. Its prediction should be read within that literary and devotional framework. The painted scene, in turn, gives visible form to the story; its concrete buildings and bodies do not provide independent historical verification of the encounter.

A garment across the threshold

The low position of the cloak is essential. Much of the painting is occupied by upright figures, tall walls, columns and windows. Against these vertical forms, the pale material spreads horizontally along the bottom edge. It joins the feet of Francis to the hands of the kneeling citizen and draws the eye through the broad interval between them. A piece of clothing becomes the connection across an otherwise open space.

The citizen spreads his pale cloak towards Francis’s feet, with their hands and the interval between them retained. Image source. Public domain. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

The citizen bends so far forward that his torso follows the cloth's direction. His green garment gives his body a broad, low silhouette. He looks upwards towards Francis, while his hands remain occupied with the material near the ground. The action has a practical clarity: the cloth has weight, folds and an edge that must be held. Its honourable meaning depends on this ordinary work of stooping and spreading.

Francis's body answers with much less movement. His long, dark civilian clothing creates a continuous upright shape, and his gold halo makes his lowered head immediately conspicuous. One hand extends towards the man; the other rests nearer his own body. His feet meet the cloth at its left end. The contrast between the citizen's deep bend and Francis's restrained inclination establishes an exchange without requiring an embrace or a grand gesture.

The cloak occupies ground directly before the steps of the central building. Those pale steps form another horizontal band, lifting the columned frontage above the meeting. The repeated levels make the foreground read as a threshold: the street and its immediate human contact lie below an imposing public façade. The cloth creates a temporary path through this civic space, marked out for one passer-by.

The honour is prospective, bestowed through the citizen's gesture before Francis has fulfilled the vocation that will justify it. The painting concentrates that expectation at the feet. Francis has a way forward laid before him, though the narrative has barely begun to explain where his life will lead.

The halo belongs to the whole story

The halo can easily make this look like a scene from Francis's established religious life. His clothing and Bonaventure's account place it earlier. He has not yet become the friar familiar from the later paintings, and the story has still to pass through acts of charity, a dream, the call at San Damiano and the public renunciation of his father's property. ^[2]

The halo therefore gives the viewer knowledge ahead of the represented moment. We recognise the saint whom the sequence is about to reveal through successive actions. The citizen, according to the text, also recognises something of that future. Francis stands between their foreknowledge and the worldly life he still inhabits. His bent head can be described directly; a precise account of his private thoughts would go beyond what either the image or this passage establishes.

That difference in knowledge gives the opening its particular pace. The scene does not begin with a crowd acclaiming a completed achievement. Four bystanders stand at the sides, leaving the centre unusually spacious. The event is small enough to be overlooked, yet the saint's halo and the citizen's gesture instruct the viewer to attend to it. Looking becomes part of the subject: the man at ground level has perceived a significance that other figures have not visibly acknowledged together.

The two men at the left stand behind Francis, close to the picture's edge. Their warm brown and dark red clothing provides a transition towards his darker figure. At the right, another pair faces inward, one in red and the other wrapped in a pale cloak. Their hands are raised in gestures of exchange. Rather than forming a single audience arranged behind the action, the observers occupy two distinct groups, with the central architecture standing between them.

It is tempting to translate these gestures into a fixed conversation, but no painted words tell us exactly what either pair says. The differences of posture are sufficient. Some figures turn towards one another; the citizen commits his whole body to the act; Francis responds quietly. Public recognition is being proposed before our eyes, while public agreement remains unresolved.

An Assisi square made for the encounter

The central building anchors the setting in Assisi. Its columned front is conventionally identified with the city's Temple of Minerva, an identification also preserved in the Fondazione Federico Zeri's photographic catalogue of this very scene. The surviving temple stands in the Piazza del Comune beside the civic tower and Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo. ^[22] This local reference makes Francis's early life belong to a recognisable city rather than to an anonymous golden background.

The painted building has an emphatic triangular pediment, a round opening and winged decorative forms, above a richly patterned horizontal frieze. Slender columns stand before a shadowed wall with a barred opening. The succession from steps to columns to pediment gives the façade a clear upward structure. Pale surfaces and ornamental bands provide a luminous centre between the darker garments at either side.

On the left, pointed windows and a tower introduce a different architectural vocabulary. On the right, an upper loggia has open bays and visible overhead beams. These structures create a varied urban setting: walls enclose, windows perforate, columns support and roofs project. Their compact arrangement gives the square density without filling its foreground with people.

Recognising the Temple of Minerva does not turn the painting into a measured record of the entire medieval piazza. The architecture has been composed around an encounter. The central façade occupies much of the field, while the figures stand below and beside it; the comparatively small human scale allows the action to unfold across the whole frontage. Its setting has the force of a place remembered and reshaped for narration. The image alone cannot establish the appearance of every neighbouring house or prove a particular visit by its designer.

The importance of the building is also compositional. Its columns divide the great central interval into narrow vertical strips, giving the eye something to cross as it follows the connection between Francis and the citizen. The broad flight of steps prevents the open centre from becoming an empty blue gap. Architecture makes their separation visible and holds the two people within one coherent setting.

The wall on which this fictive city is painted also asserts itself. Above the pediment, a projecting rectangular architectural element interrupts the blue field. In the whole fresco, the imagined sky accommodates an obstruction belonging to the surrounding church. That interruption is a useful reminder of how differently the painting exists on a wall from a detached reproduction trimmed to its figures. A public square has been fitted into an already articulated building.

An opening scene painted later?

The relatively slender people and the prominence of the architecture matter beyond the subject itself. They have helped scholars distinguish Homage from other parts of the Franciscan cycle. In Giottus Pictor II, Michael Viktor Schwarz contrasts its small, elongated figures with the more compact figures of the following Gift of the Mantle. He challenges the assumption that the sequence was designed and executed with complete stylistic unity. ^[23]

Schwarz gives a particularly useful comparison with the sixteenth episode, the Death of the Knight of Celano. He argues that the opening scene is more closely related to that painting than to the last three episodes, with which it has often been grouped. In both Homage and Celano, one can look for the relation between a spacious architectural construction and comparatively slender people. The resemblance is a point of entry into his argument, rather than a sufficient attribution test by itself. ^[23]

The differences between the two scenes are equally revealing. At Celano, Francis stands behind a laid table within an elaborate architectural setting, while the host's death and the surrounding mourners concentrate movement in the foreground at the right. In Homage, the citizen's low body and the spread garment occupy that lower zone, but the event is calmer and far less crowded. Buildings help organise both images without making them repetitions of one composition.

Drawing on Erik Moltesen's earlier distinction between two groups of paintings, and discussing Bruno Zanardi's technical observations, Schwarz proposes two campaigns with different approaches to design and execution. He regards the delayed painting of the first scene as an important part of the problem. The continuity of the story, on this reading, conceals a less continuous history of work on the walls. ^[23]

Miklós Boskovits offers a different reconstruction in his 2001 Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry on Giotto. He argues for Giotto's guiding role through much of the project, with a new assistant becoming visible from the Celano scene onwards. In his account, that collaborator eventually executed episodes twenty-five to twenty-eight and the present first episode. Boskovits also considers it more plausible that an earlier subject in the opening position was changed before the whole cycle was complete, rather than that this position had simply remained unpainted from the outset. ^[24]

These accounts overlap in recognising differences between the present Homage and the early scenes that follow it. Their explanations differ substantially over the organisation and continuity of the undertaking. Schwarz's two campaigns should therefore not be merged into Boskovits's account of a developing collaboration under Giotto's guidance. Nor does either reconstruction license a certain personal name for the painter of the kneeling citizen or the architecture. Even the basilica's own description acknowledges the wider division between scholars who favour Giotto and those who favour a Roman school. ^[25]

For the viewer, the practical consequence is simple and useful. First in the story and first on the painter's schedule are separate questions. Homage was required to open Francis's life as it could be understood retrospectively. The people who painted it could already have been responding to other completed parts of that life on the church walls.

The next cloak and the next question

The following Gift of the Mantle changes Francis's role. Bonaventure describes him encountering an impoverished soldier of noble birth and giving him his clothes. That act belongs to the next section of the Major Legend. It must be distinguished from the citizen's spreading of his own cloak in Homage: here Francis receives honour; there he responds to another person's need. ^[26]

Francis giving his mantle in the next episode, a separate reversal of who gives and receives.

The Dream of the Palace then introduces military equipment marked with the cross and a promise Francis initially interprets through worldly ambition. The opening sequence gradually tests what greatness will mean. Public respect, generosity and the desire for distinction enter the story before Francis fully understands the direction in which he is being called. ^[26]

That makes the first painting a carefully suspended beginning. The citizen's action seems to know the conclusion, while the young man in civilian dress still has the story ahead of him. The architecture gives the encounter the breadth of a public occasion, yet the decisive connection remains the narrow exchange between a lowered face and an upturned one. Across the pale cloak, a passer-by is invited to become someone whose significance the city will eventually recognise.