This is my review of the book Struttura di una leggenda. La vita di San Francesco dipinta da Giotto ad Assisi by Umberto Milizia
The popularity of Francis of Assisi has found over the centuries few equals to interior of the Christian world and it remains intact in our de-christianized time. Evidently, the multiplicity of themes contained in his legend allows the appropriation and the interpretation to very different cultures. Umberto Maria Milizia comments in his book "Structure of a legend. The life of St. Francis painted by Giotto in Assisi" (ed. Artecom, Rome 2002), the representation of twenty-eight episodes of the life of St. Francis by Giotto in the upper basilica of Assisi, taken from lthe Legenda Maior, the official version of the life of Francis, written by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, general of Franciscan Order from 1257 to 1274. Already this element confirms the affirmation of Milizia regarding the collective nature of this pictorial cycle: both at the executive level for the presence, obvious in an enterprise of such dimensions, of the hand of other painters, both at the ideative level, conditioned by the thematic choices made by the Franciscan Order. The cycle arranged from left to right, passing through the door of entrance, is composed of three groups: the episodes of Francis without the Order, those with the Order and the saint, and finally the Order that continues Francis. And it is evident from this scheme the main purpose of these frescoes: to propose an interpretation of Francis that makes it coincide with the ecclesiastical institution that refers to him. We know that all this is a mystification: the Order of Friars Minors vigorously and successfully opposed the will of Francis, while he himself was still alive. He then had the temptation to disown his creature but in the end, because of the desire for sacrifice that was so strong in him, he tolerated its degeneration, considering it his personal crucifixion. The authoritarian mentality of the saint, common trait to medieval humanity, exalted the concept of obedience also towards that Roman Church that until last successfully tried to expropriate him of his Order. In fact, his will with the last reference to authentic interpretation of the Rule, which he wanted to have the force of law for his brothers, was canceled by Pope Gregory I in 1230. The will clearly stated that the Order to be able to define itself as Franciscan, that is, to be in conformity with the religious intuitions of its founder, should not have property, it had to maintain itself with the work of the friars (other than beggars...) and refuse privileges and duties on the part of the Church, such as filling in for the secular clergy and listening to confessions. An Order that had followed this rule of life would not have been useful to the papacy, indeed it would have been to be feared as a potential critical conscience. It therefore responded to a political necessity the damnatio memoriae of the authentic Francis, that is the destruction of all the oldest sources, to eliminate in the Order the opposition to the profound change of his spiritual heritage. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, the discovery of some copies escaped the fire has irretrievably shattered the truth of Bonaventure and Giotto. For these reasons, the twenty-eight paintings of Giotto's narrative fail to transmit to us, in their majority, the charm of a character who intuited and at the same time removed the deeply anti-evangelic nature of power and that made poverty and love the cornerstones of life. And really central to a correct understanding of inspiration of Francis identify what value attributed to the work: rightly the Militia cites the function of example, but example to what? For the saint, who implicitly referred to Paul: If someone does not want to work even eat, II Thess. 3: 10) the value and the example of the work consist in an act of love towards others, that is, in a non-parasitic or non-exploiting lifestyle. The Franciscan work, therefore, was not ascetic technique among others as for Benedict (idea that the apocryphal ora et labora completely misunderstands), but also it was not a value in itself, its meaning was located completely all external, opposing itself prejudicially to any bourgeois exaltation of work and its fruits On the other hand, an Order of working friars presupposed a new conception of religious life and, therefore, of life tout court: the divine call was not a totalitarian and monistic dimension that excluded the earthly and the human, but it had to leave time and space to these other dimensions. The subsequent Franciscan art resumed, therefore, an original theme of the movement, which legitimized the attention to the manifold and the transient: a new vision that came out of the Gothic, which made resolve the dualism between earthly and transcendent in the escape to the second. It considered, instead, not ephemeral the nature of the created world, it accepted it as a second dimension (alter,according to Christ St. Francis was called) in which we are fully immersed. This produced in architecture the creation of unitary and completed spaces, reducing as much as possible stained glass windows, spires and naves, while in painting there was a demand for increasing realism. As clearly appears from the analytical pages of Militia, the new iconography of Giotto satisfied this need, creating a cycle of images of sacred subject, but of an exclusively narrative nature, in compliance with the Western aesthetics of the Carolini books, which gave a didactic-aesthetic justification of the presence of images but not of their cult. They were sacred for the subjective faith of the spectator or the author, not for an objective inspiration granted to the believing artist, much less for being what in Byzantium they had been considered: living presences that looked, not dead matter that was looked at. By moving away definitively from the icon, synthesis and selection, which did not tell stories but understandings of stories, Giotto opened the way to a freer and richer art, in which nature and the human would have acquired their full sovereignty.