Cathy's Art Diary

Disappointing online lecture from the National Gallery on Giotto’s St Francis frescos in the church at Assisi. Artists and art historian, Aliki Braine, guided us though the technique of fresco and the narrative of the major fresco in the upper church as a coda to the National Gallery’s current St Francis exhibition which, of course, couldn’t include the frescos. It is always wonderful to look at this cycle again and Braine had beautiful illustrations but I would have liked a bit less on the technique, which I have studied quite often, and more on the iconography of the frescos themselves, why they were so groundbreaking and how they helped to establish the fame and importance of Francis.

Fascinating online lecture from Birkbeck College looking at the symbolism of the vaults in the lower church of St Francis in Assisi. John Renner took us though the four faults over St Francis’s tomb possibly by Giotto linking their allegorical narrative with the theology of the Franciscan order at the time. He took us though the imagery in some detail and pointed out that the three vaults on the vows of the order all followed the same pictorial template. I love this sort of detailed analysis of images and wish we had had longer on them. Looking again as I write this I find myself looking at sections he didn’t describe and wondering what they mean. Oh dear, another place to add to the post lockdown list!

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Assisi in Early Italian Art. This was a third day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Assisi. I’d been a number of years ago and it was lovely to have this reminder of what I’d seen and it made me want to go back soon.   We went through the art chronologically with an obvious focus on images of St Francis. In the morning we looked at the art in the lower church from around Francis’s tomb from the earliest period soon after his death. This work was mainly by Maestro di San Fancesco and Cimabue. The lecturer John Renner took us through the works and talked about how these works defined the iconography of the saint. We then moved onto the Upper Church and a Giotto fest, or is it? John talked about how the earliest Frescos were by other artists from Rome such as the Isaac Master shown here. He also looked at whe...