Sermon before Honorius III

Francis stands at the edge of a richly furnished room, his bare feet close to its painted border. Before him, the pope sits above two decorated steps, one hand resting against his chin. Between the standing preacher and the elevated listener, a gathering of churchmen turns the occasion into a study of attention. The subject is Sermon before Pope Honorius III, the seventeenth scene in the twenty-eight-part life of Saint Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi. ^[1]

The painting belongs to the Franciscan cycle traditionally associated with Giotto, whose authorship and division of work remain disputed. ^[2] A sermon becomes visible through bodies, hands and the space shared by a speaker and his audience. Francis's voice cannot reach us, and the words of this particular sermon are not supplied by its narrative source. The fresco gives us the conditions of the encounter instead: the preacher's modest place, the listeners' differently held heads, and the splendid chamber surrounding them.

The sermon Francis forgot

Bonaventure tells the story in chapter XII, section 7 of his Major Legend. At the suggestion of the Bishop of Ostia, Francis prepares a sermon carefully and commits it to memory. When he stands before the pope and cardinals, however, he forgets it so completely that he cannot utter any of the prepared words. He acknowledges what has happened with humility, invokes the Holy Spirit, and begins to speak anew. His words move the assembled dignitaries to repentance; Bonaventure presents their effect as evidence of the Spirit speaking through him. ^[22]

This is a carefully shaped account of spiritual authority. The preparation, the failure of memory and the subsequent fluency form a sequence in which Francis's dependence on divine help becomes apparent. The intended audience matters. These are people accustomed to teaching, judging and exercising authority within the Church. In Bonaventure's telling, they themselves receive instruction from the poor friar standing among them.

The passage begins by describing the force of Francis's preaching more generally. Bonaventure associates it with divine inspiration and compares its penetration to burning fire. That setting helps explain why the failed recollection is included. The lapse establishes the difference between the speech Francis has secured in advance and the speech the author credits to the Holy Spirit. It offers no basis for diagnosing a permanent difficulty with speech or memory, and no reason to reconstruct an exact lost sermon from the gestures in the fresco. ^[22]

There is a small but useful distinction between text and title. In this passage Bonaventure calls the listener the pope without giving his personal name. The established identification of the painted scene is preaching before Honorius III: the Franciscan scene index uses that title and connects it to XII.7, while Michael Viktor Schwarz also identifies the subject as the sermon before Honorius III in his study of the Assisi cycle. ^{[1] [23]} The title therefore locates the conventional subject of the painting; it should not be treated as a personal name quoted from this particular paragraph of Bonaventure.

A speaker at the left

Francis occupies the left-hand bay of the painted hall. His halo marks him immediately, yet his body has little of the display surrounding the papal throne. His brown-grey habit falls in long folds, gathered by a cord. His feet are bare. The sweep of his hood and the broad volume of the sleeve make the upper body substantial without adding ornamental richness. The plainness is especially noticeable against the minute coloured patterns covering the wall behind him. ^[24]

One hand rises close to his chest, its fingers turned outward in a compact speaking gesture. The other is held nearer his body. The movement has enough definition to suggest an articulated point, but the painting provides no verbal key that would allow a particular sentence to be attached to it. His head and gaze carry the address towards the seated company. The contained gesture suits the tightness of the room: there is little empty space in which a broad movement could unfold.

At Francis's feet, a hooded friar sits low on the floor. His body folds across the foreground, with his head supported by a hand. The long horizontal spread of his robe contrasts with the preacher's upright figure. His presence also makes the difference in levels unusually clear. A Franciscan companion sits at floor height; the churchmen occupy seats; the pope rises above them on his throne. The encounter remains legible through these positions before any individual expression is considered.

The seated companion is worth a second look because he prevents the left side from becoming merely an isolated emblem of the saint. His bent body belongs to the room's physical life. A knee, a sleeve and the supporting arm establish a sustained posture, with the weight of a person who has settled into listening. His proximity connects him to Francis, while the shared gesture of head supported by hand creates a visual echo with the much more elevated pope.

The pope and his company

The pope is placed slightly to the right of the painting's centre. A tall headpiece, red mantle and white band marked with dark crosses distinguish his office. His throne stands on a small stepped platform whose faces carry dense geometric decoration. The visible side of the steps gives the raised seat depth; its ornament gives the central figure a setting as elaborate as his dress. ^[24]

Pope Honorius III and the nearby listeners beneath the painted vault. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

His supporting hand is the detail around which the encounter seems to slow. It reaches beneath the chin while his face turns towards Francis. The other hand rests lower, near his knee. The pose can suggest concentrated listening, though it cannot tell us the precise thought passing through the painted listener's mind. Its effectiveness comes from its bodily clarity. A head has weight, a hand supports it, and an attentive face remains directed towards the speaker.

The figures beside him offer variations on that action. To the viewer's left of the throne, one churchman inclines his head towards a hand, while another raises a hand with an open, responsive movement. Further left, a blue-cloaked listener faces the preacher. On the opposite side, a group in blue, red and warm orange closes the room's right-hand bay. Their faces turn at different angles, and their hands are variously hidden, rested or held against the folds of their clothing.

The raised hand beside the throne answers the preacher's small movement across the room. The bent heads introduce pauses. The figure at the far right, turned in profile towards the centre, helps direct attention back into the gathering. Clothes spread across seats and knees, giving the company a shared weight and stillness even where the heads and hands remain active.

Bonaventure says that the listeners are moved to repentance. The fresco offers gestures through which a viewer can imagine the sermon being received. Those two kinds of evidence should remain distinguishable. A bowed head may contribute to the painting's account of inward response, but assigning a separate named emotion to every figure would give the image a precision it does not possess. Its interest lies in the range of listening it allows us to observe.

Three bays for a single encounter

The room occupies a remarkable amount of the scene. Three pointed arches span its front, supported by slender dark columns. Beyond them, ribbed blue vaults curve back towards pale walls pierced by narrow paired windows. Coloured bands pick out the arches and ribs. The small scale of the windows and the repetition of the vaults make the chamber seem to extend around its occupants. ^[24]

Architecture divides the company without breaking the encounter. Francis and his companion occupy the left side; the pope and nearby churchmen gather beneath the central opening; the remaining listeners fill the right. The two inner columns stand in front of the people and partly interrupt our access to them. They establish a foreground through which we look into the room. At the same time, their verticals give each group a stable place within the wider arrangement.

Look above the figures and the spatial argument becomes more intricate. The vault ribs turn away from the picture's surface, while the window openings appear on walls presented at different angles. The front arches and the rear surfaces belong to successive layers. These relationships encourage the eye to move inward, then return to the bodies below. The architecture promises a room large enough to contain the gathering, even as the people remain close to us at its open front.

The surface behind the figures is almost as important as the vaulting. A richly patterned hanging runs around the lower walls, its upper edge forming shallow curves. Small circular and flower-like motifs create a dense field of ornament. Against it, the broad areas of the robes remain easy to distinguish: the saint's muted habit, the blue garments, the pope's red and white, the warm fabric at the right. Intricate decoration and solid human forms occupy the same small space without dissolving into one another.

The painted hall carries a sense of ceremonial dignity, but it also does practical narrative work. It brings the preacher and the people he addresses into one continuous enclosure. The room's regularity steadies a scene whose subject is the unpredictable renewal of speech. Bonaventure describes the failure of a carefully prepared discourse; the image places the resulting address inside a highly ordered structure. The listener can follow the architectural rhythm while imagining words travelling across the divisions between the bays.

This is pictorial architecture, shaped to make the gathering comprehensible. The image alone does not establish a measured reconstruction of an identifiable papal chamber. Nor does its convincing depth require us to describe it as a fully consistent system of later Renaissance perspective. The projecting steps, overlapping figures, foreground columns and receding vaults give us several connected ways of understanding where people are. Their combined effect is the crucial one: each body occupies a place, and each place has a relationship to Francis.

Earlier approval, later preaching

The papal setting recalls the cycle's earlier Confirmation of the Rule, its seventh episode. There, Francis kneels before a seated pope, accompanied by a tightly gathered group of brothers. Here he stands, with one companion below him, addressing a more dispersed company. The difference is visible in the arrangement of the figures: the earlier picture concentrates action in the meeting of Francis and the pontiff, while the sermon distributes its action through a succession of listeners. ^[24]

The stories also concern different acts. Bonaventure's account of the early approval names Innocent III and links his reception of Francis to the dream of the endangered Lateran basilica. In a separate passage, he describes the later confirmation of the Rule by Honorius. The sermon in XII.7 concerns inspired preaching before the pope and cardinals. Its subject does not become another Rule approval simply because Honorius appears in its conventional title. ^[22]

Keeping those episodes distinct makes the return to a papal audience more rewarding. Earlier, the brothers seek recognition for their way of life and their preaching. In the sermon scene, the founder is shown exercising that preaching before the Church's senior listeners. The programme can thus present both Francis's relationship with ecclesiastical authority and the force of the instruction he brings to those who possess it. The papal throne remains elevated, while the standing friar holds the company's attention.

The neighbouring sermon at Arles

The next scene, Apparition at the Chapter of Arles, offers a close comparison in its arrangement of speaking and listening. Anthony stands at the left before an assembly of seated friars; Francis appears further back with his arms extended. In the Honorius scene, Francis occupies the preacher's place himself. At Arles, his extraordinary presence becomes a second focus within another preacher's address. The repeated combination of standing speaker, seated assembly and articulated interior makes the change especially clear. ^{[1] [24]}

The Assisi Apparition at Arles, with Anthony preaching and Francis appearing at the back. Image source. Public domain. Proportionally reduced reproduction; no colour or content enhancement.

A low, bent friar at the left of the Arles gathering also recalls the companion in the papal sermon. Schwarz develops this resemblance into a more particular proposal: he connects these seated figures with a companion in Pietro Lorenzetti's Lower Church Stigmatisation, arguing that the pose was adapted with alterations to the limbs. He places the connection within his reconstruction of different painting campaigns at Assisi. ^[23] The comparison draws attention to a small supporting figure that might otherwise be passed over; the proposed borrowing and its chronological implications remain Schwarz's argument.

Such recurring poses need not carry identical narrative meanings. In the papal sermon, the low companion contributes to the difference between Franciscan simplicity and the furnished audience. At Arles, seated and crouching bodies build up an assembly of brothers around Anthony and the apparition. A useful pictorial form can help organise two encounters while the setting and surrounding figures give it different work to do.

Giotto and the making of the scene

The fresco is regularly encountered under Giotto's name, but that familiar heading encompasses a substantial scholarly disagreement. The basilica's own account of the Upper Church acknowledges both a Giotto attribution and a Roman-school interpretation of the Franciscan paintings. ^[2] Even among scholars who defend Giotto's leading role, the allocation of individual passages to assistants is a separate question.

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.

Miklós Boskovits, writing in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, argues strongly for Giotto's authorship of the cycle while identifying an increasingly important assistant from the sixteenth scene onward. His account therefore cannot be reduced to a claim that every figure in this seventeenth episode is securely by Giotto's own hand. ^[25] Schwarz, by contrast, questions assumptions of unity and proposes distinct campaigns, including a later one informed by Sienese painting. ^[23] These interpretations also affect the sequence in which scholars understand the cycle's relationship to other works.

The uncertainty is best kept close to the painting. Its visible coherence is real: people, furnishings and architecture sustain a single encounter. That coherence does not, by itself, identify every painter who contributed to it. What survives for the viewer is a remarkably sustained act of picturing speech. Francis's modest gesture draws an answer from a nearby hand; the pope supports his head; coloured robes settle over seated bodies; the vaults gather the whole company into one room. Bonaventure's story turns forgotten words into a demonstration of inspired preaching. The fresco lets us dwell on the human forms through which such preaching is heard.