Renunciation of Worldly Goods

Francis stands almost naked at the edge of a crowd, his joined hands raised towards the hand in the sky. Behind him, the bishop draws a cloak around his waist. Across the narrow stretch of ground between them, his father holds the clothes that Francis has surrendered; another man restrains his outstretched arm. The division is unmistakable, yet the painting keeps the two sides close enough for the broken relationship to remain painfully visible.

The Renunciation of Worldly Goods is the fifth scene in the twenty-eight-part Franciscan cycle in the Upper Church of the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi. It follows the encounter with the crucifix at San Damiano and precedes the dream of Pope Innocent III. Its subject comes from chapter II, section 4 of Bonaventure's Major Legend of Saint Francis: Francis returns his possessions and clothes before the bishop, relinquishing his claim on his father's inheritance and declaring his trust in his Father in heaven. ^[1] This is the Upper Church painting traditionally associated with Giotto. Its powerful arrangement can be studied closely even while the authorship and date of the cycle remain disputed.

A story told through clothes

Bonaventure places the confrontation within an unfolding account of conversion. Francis has responded to the command to repair San Damiano; money, family authority and his new religious purpose have come into conflict. In the preceding sections, his father tries to recover him and his money. The recovered money on a window ledge belongs to that earlier part of the narrative. The meeting before the bishop then brings a different question into public view: what remains of the father's claim over his son and the son's place within the family? ^[21]

In section 4 the father wishes Francis to surrender his inheritance claim and return what he possesses. Francis acts immediately on entering the bishop's presence. Bonaventure makes the speed important: he waits for neither an instruction nor a speech. He removes his garments and restores them to his father. A hairshirt is revealed beneath the outer clothes; then he takes off even his breeches and stands naked before everyone. The sequence strips away successive layers, turning a dispute over possessions into an action carried out upon the body itself. ^[21]

Francis's accompanying declaration transfers the language of fatherhood from his earthly parent to the heavenly Father of the Lord's Prayer. Bonaventure connects that change with treasure, trust and hope. Francis is giving up an expected source of material security, and the story locates his new security in God. The declaration gives the gathered witnesses a way to understand the action: the surrendered clothes accompany a change in allegiance and expectation.

The bishop's response is equally physical. In Bonaventure's telling, he rises, weeps, embraces Francis and covers him with the cloak he himself has been wearing. He then asks his servants for clothing. A rough tunic belonging to one of the bishop's farm servants is brought, and Francis marks it with a cross in chalk. Bonaventure explicitly links this poor, partly naked follower with the stripped and crucified Christ. ^[21]

Those successive actions help explain the painted moment without requiring every one of them to appear in it. The fresco concentrates upon the confrontation, the discarded clothes and the bishop's covering gesture. It does not show Francis drawing a chalk cross on a replacement tunic. The later departure from Assisi and encounter with robbers, narrated in the next section, likewise lie beyond this image. The painting holds together renunciation and immediate shelter; the text carries Francis onward into a new manner of life.

Bonaventure's work is a saint's life, shaped to reveal the meaning of Francis's conversion. It gives the scene its narrative and theological framework. Its vivid account should be read in that genre, rather than treated as a verbatim record of a legal hearing. The inheritance claim is explicit in the story; an exact reconstruction of the proceedings, the words of every witness or the calendar date cannot be recovered from the painted architecture and gestures.

The gap between father and son

The composition divides its people into two unequal groups. On the left, men in varied caps crowd behind the father, with two children near the foreground. On the right, Francis stands before the bishop and a smaller cluster of attendants. A dark, relatively open strip separates the groups. Above it, the pale expanse of the sky broadens the division. The viewer can register the opposing sides before identifying each participant. ^[22]

Francis's body makes that gap active. His bare feet stand close to the base of the building on the right, while his upper body and raised arms extend into the open centre. His head tilts upward. The figure is attached to the bishop's group by the cloth around his lower body, yet his hands carry the eye away from the crowd toward the small hand appearing above. These different directions hold him between a human confrontation and a heavenly address.

The father's posture deserves the same care. He looks across toward Francis; his head remains within the horizontal exchange between the two groups. One arm reaches backward into the hold of the man beside him. His other arm supports the returned garments, which hang in a conspicuous bundle. The restrained arm gives his forward position force and tension, but it does not require us to invent the next blow or assign a modern psychological diagnosis. The image provides bodily evidence of conflict, not access to his private thoughts.

The contrast in their hands is especially clear. Francis's hands are lifted and brought together. The father's hands remain implicated in human restraint and the handling of possessions. The clothes are still recognisable things, carrying the action back to the title's worldly goods. Beside them, Francis's exposed torso shows what it means to cease holding such things. Renunciation has acquired a visible cost.

The distance between the men is small in physical terms. Neither has disappeared into a separate landscape, and the father still stands directly across from his son. Yet the open ground cannot be crossed without changing the structure of the scene. The painter has made a family rupture legible through an interval that the surrounding crowd leaves unfilled. The vacant strip is one of the most consequential elements in an otherwise crowded image.

The bishop's cloak

The bishop stands immediately behind Francis. His mitre makes his office conspicuous, but the decisive detail is the cloth extending from his shoulders around the young man's waist. His hand helps secure it. Bare skin, the edge of the covering and the bishop's own robed body meet in a tightly connected group. ^[22]

The bishop covers Francis with a cloth, with Francis’s raised hands and bare feet retained. Image source. Public domain. Cropped and proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

Bonaventure's detail that the cloak is the bishop's own gives this covering particular weight. Francis has returned clothing to his father and is now covered by someone else. The painter brings the two exchanges into a single field: surrendered garments hang on the left, while an offered covering wraps the body on the right. The same everyday necessity becomes the means of separating possession from care.

The cloak also keeps the bishop from becoming a remote official who merely presides over the encounter. He participates through touch. Francis's public vulnerability receives an immediate practical response, close enough to be seen in the placement of a hand. In the narrative the bishop recognises Francis's fervour; in the painting his protection is available to the eye before a viewer knows the words of the story.

This makes the relationship between poverty and the Church unusually concrete. Francis's choice leaves him exposed, but the religious authority beside him provides shelter. The image therefore joins the break with paternal property to a new form of belonging. It does not present the solitary figure as self-sufficient. Even while his hands turn upward, his body depends upon the cloth another person holds around it.

The returned clothes fall as separate things from the father's arm; the bishop's cloak remains connected to a living wearer. The distinction is visible in their handling. One set has become a bundle to be carried away, while the other is being used at this moment to protect someone. This modest action makes the larger religious claim intelligible through an ordinary human need.

A public watching place

The two children at the lower left give the gathering a scale beyond the principal adult confrontation. They stand beside the men, their small bodies fully visible where many of the adults are reduced to overlapping heads and shoulders. Their proximity brings another generation into the audience. Their small, clear silhouettes also give a visual counterweight to the compressed mass of heads above. ^[22]

The adults behind the father are varied through small shifts of direction. Some faces appear in profile, others more frontally; hats overlap and the rear figures are partly concealed. The gathering has depth without becoming a row of equally exposed spectators. The man holding the father's arm is drawn into the main action, while those farther back can watch from within the press of people. The eye moves through these partial views before returning to the much more exposed body of Francis.

This arrangement has also become part of the scholarly argument about the painting. Michael Viktor Schwarz, writing in 2008, compared the overlapping faces in the Renunciation with the group around the good centurion in the Scrovegni Chapel Crucifixion. He judged their purpose differently: in his reading, the Assisi grouping produces formal variety and animation rather than the kind of narrative interaction he found at Padua. ^[23] That is a specific critical judgment about how a crowd works, rather than an agreed verdict on the fresco's success.

It is a useful observation to test against the picture. The principal confrontation is indeed carried by a few bodies and gestures; many of the faces behind the father contribute the density of an audience. Yet that density affects the episode's meaning. Francis makes his choice before people who can see the clothes, the restraint and the bishop's response. Their visibility turns his relinquishment into a social event, and their compact arrangement heightens the isolation of the space immediately around him.

Architecture on either side

The buildings rise in two strongly separated masses. On the left, an exterior staircase climbs toward an upper level, bounded by pale supports and rails. On the right, the structure behind the bishop's group combines a broad lower wall with arches, a small pedimented upper feature and a tall projecting section. Columns, cornices and contrasting wall planes make these buildings substantial presences. ^[22]

Their distribution echoes the human division below. The architecture leaves the central sky open, so the gap between the groups continues above their heads. On the left, the diagonal stair leads the eye upward through a structure full of openings. On the right, the broad wall rises close behind Francis and the bishop. Although the forms suggest a public urban setting, they need not be treated as a measured portrait of the precise place where the encounter occurred.

Schwarz related the Renunciation's architectural inventions to a late Byzantine tradition also represented in the Upper Church's Doctors' vault. ^[23] This comparison places its elaborate structures within a continuing repertory of painted architecture. The forms can still perform a direct narrative task: their size and separation frame the confrontation, keep its opposing parties distinct and reserve the central opening for Francis's lifted gesture.

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 hand above occupies that opening with remarkable economy. It offers no second crowd or fully described heavenly setting. A small sign is enough to establish the direction of Francis's address. The father's face, the son's upturned head and the hand in the sky set out different lines of attention within the same shallow arena. The picture gives visible form to Bonaventure's change in the meaning of fatherhood.

Giotto, collaborators and the disputed date

The fresco belongs to the Assisi cycle long associated with Giotto, but the name does not settle every question of its making. The basilica's own account records the continuing division between scholars who attribute the Franciscan cycle to Giotto and those who favour a Roman school. ^[24] A responsible description therefore distinguishes the familiar attribution from a claim that this entire scene is securely by his unaided hand.

The disagreement also concerns chronology. In his 2001 Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry, Miklós Boskovits argued for Giotto's leading role in the Upper Church campaign, including the early Franciscan episodes. He placed the cycle within the artist's development in the 1290s, before the Scrovegni Chapel paintings. ^[25] His account allows for collaborators while maintaining the continuity of Giotto's direction.

Schwarz proposed a different sequence in 2008. His conclusion considers a first Franciscan campaign around 1308, with the style of Padua reaching Assisi either through Giotto's limited direction or through a former collaborator. His reading of the Renunciation crowd contributes to that larger argument. ^[26] The alternatives change the direction in which a resemblance is understood: evidence of preparation for Padua in one chronology can become evidence of knowledge of Padua in another. They should remain distinguishable scholarly positions.

The painting's immediate place in the narrative is clearer. After the prayer before the crucifix at San Damiano, Francis's response to a religious command becomes a public surrender of family possessions. In the following dream of Innocent III, the poor man will be associated with supporting the Church itself. Between these scenes, the bishop's cloak gives a small, bodily image of protection and recognition. Francis stands without his former clothes, his father holds what has been returned, and the space between them remains open beneath the hand in the sky.