A Light in the Darkness by Albert Marrin

Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Germany/ Bernd Sinterhauf Saint Francis Before the Sultan by Fra Angelico, 1429. It’s in scenes of the saint’s encounters with popes and sultans. It is in the enveloping embrace he extends to the crucified Christ in a colossal Murillo, and in modest prints of the poor by Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. It is in his loving face, looking down on the newborn Christ in Josefa de Óbidos’s nativity (the 17th-century Spanish-born Portuguese painter is a new name to me). One of the most unexpected works here is an illuminated manuscript by a monk in St Albans around 1240 (less than two decades after the saint’s death) in which Francis appears talking to a crane, a heron, a hawk and two songbirds: an almost comically attentive audience. Cuddlesome old Francis, his habit now a dressing gown with matching slippers, appears surrounded by Aylesbury ducks in Stanley Spencer’s Berkshire back yard.įrancis is so human – no miracles, cheerful friendships – and yet surpassingly strange.

Here is Brother Francis, in trademark brown habit and tonsure, opening his arms wide to a 19th-century sunrise over the mountains. Here is a Renaissance Francis, struggling out of his costly coat to press it on a poor man.

He stands for peace, hope and love, for equality, hugging and ecology. He is such an inspiration to artists (he himself contemplated God through art) as to be almost a recurrent protagonist in the National Gallery’s own collection, and more images have arrived from abroad to tell the life, and imagine the man, in this enthralling and magnificent show. He travels all the way to Egypt to meet a sultan, and more than once to visit the pope both are charmed and he is permitted to found a new order.įrancis is also a saint for all seasons: a pioneer for Renaissance artists, a mystic for baroque visionaries, a muse for the Romantics, a social radical for our times. He talks to the animals, loves sparrows, wolves and people with leprosy, writes paeans to Brother Moon and Sister Sun, restores churches (and quite possibly the church itself) while roving Italy as an itinerant preacher.

Born filthy rich in Assisi c 1181, he gives it all up to look after others. It is the perfect start to this show.Īnd Francis is the perfect saint, for art as for his fellow beings. They record not only eight days of seeing through the saint’s eyes, but the character of the man himself: his love of starry nights, of watching the Earth turn, loving his fellow beings, feeling the breeze shiver through Italian trees. His shining phrases radiate across the gallery wall in the shape of the glowing sun Francis saw as his sister. L ark song, white butterflies, moonrise, foals: this is what the artist Richard Long saw on his pilgrimage through Umbria in the footsteps of Saint Francis.

A Light in the Darkness by Albert Marrin