Saint Francis as Jesus, the New Christ, the Thirteenth Apostle who came to save the Church and the world.
There is the hand of one of the greatest painters of the thirteenth century but of whom nothing is known behind the season which towards the middle of that century saw the birth and development in Assisi of the international construction site of artists committed to placing the Saint at the center of scene in the ideological wake traced by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio.
It was precisely the Master of San Francesco, named as such at the end of the 19th century by the German art historian Henry Thode, who took up Giunta Pisano's lesson which went beyond the representation of the crucifix with his eyes open and triumphant over death, instead humanizing it in suffering the features and appearances, inserting new elements such as the full figures of Saint John and the Madonna on the sides of the cross and the Saint, also with the stigmata, at the bleeding feet of Jesus.
To celebrate its value, overshadowed a few decades later by Cimabue and the power of Giotto, is the National Gallery of Umbria from 9 March to 10 June with the great exhibition 'The Enigma of the Master of San Francesco.
The stil novo of the thirteenth century Umbria', in the eighth centenary of the stigmata of the Patron Saint of Italy, which will be inaugurated by the minister Sangiuliano.
The curators - Andrea De Marchi, Veruska Picchiarelli and Emanuele Zappasodi - have selected around sixty works, bringing together, as never before, seven of the nine of the Maestro's known mobile masterpieces.
The beating heart of the story in eight sections is the Painted Cross of almost five meters - the largest with that of Cimabue ever made in Italy and which has now become the symbol of the Wildebeest - created in 1272 for the church of San Francesco al Prato and the portions of the altarpiece painted on both sides which was finally recomposed with the arrivals from the National Gallery in Washington, the Metropolitan in New York and the Sacred Convent museum.
The installation, in the evocative midnight blue which recalls the vault of the lower basilica of Assisi, where the artist painted the scenes from the life of Jesus mirroring those of Francis as Alter Christus, evokes the apse of the Perugian church ''in dialogue' ' with all the works.
The itinerary starts from the Stauroteca of Cosenza, a golden reliquary of the cross made in Palermo around 1170 which refers to the Byzantine world, and develops with the crosses of Giunta Pisano (from the Porziuncola museum and from Pisa) which recall the iconography of the suffering Christ taken as a model by the Master of San Francesco.
Also notable for its value as a relic is the panel depicting the Saint between two angels which, according to tradition, Francis used as a bed and on which his body was placed after his death.
Here the Master shows for the first time the wound in the Poverello's side, proof of the sanctity of the stigmata certified by the two popes of the time Gregory IX and Alexander IV.
The two medium-sized crosses from the Louvre and the National Gallery in London stand alongside that of the Gnu before the grand finale with the large Cross from 1270 which comes from Gualdo Tadino and the Hagiographic Altarpiece of Santa Chiara, painted by Maestro di Santa Chiara, granted exceptionally by the Basilica of Assisi.
''The master of San Francesco - observes Veruska Picchiarelli - was a highly refined painter, an artist of feelings and emotion due to his obsessive attention to detail and the ability to express affections and the inner world''.
A protagonist who had a fundamental role in giving birth to a stylistic tradition, ''the passion of the Umbrians'', and in giving life to the official iconography of the Saint ''by lucidly interpreting the directives of the Franciscan order and the Church'' '.
''Never before was Perugia truly caput mundi - remarked Andrea De Marchi -.
With Assisi it was a bit like the New York of the time.
Those works describe a fiery and incandescent world.
A great theater that speaks profoundly with the power of art''.
Finally, the enveloping virtual room reconstructs the Lower Basilica of Assisi mapped to the centimeter.
The visitor is suggested a route towards this extraordinary sacred place where the single, bare and bare nave became around 1270 ''a multicolored treasure chest, the enormous reliquary with the five stories of the life of the Saint on the walls on one side and of Christ on the 'another, a kalidoscope of which today only larvae remain''.
Small mirrors were scattered among the decorations of the vault to simulate the stars in the night.
Another special effect by the artist which represented ''the last fireworks of the Byzantine legacy that will be swept away by Giotto''.
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