Word: artes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...holy and frugal St. Francis believed that his order of monks ought to survive by begging. In a way, this pious tradition is preserved by a show that is now on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi" comprises some 70 works of art--paintings, sculpture, textiles, manuscripts and metalwork--drawn in part from the 13th century tesoro, or museum, of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, Italy. Its main purpose is to draw attention to the disaster that struck the great pilgrimage center in September 1997, when...
This was the worst catastrophe to afflict the fragile patrimony of Italian art history since the 1966 flood in Florence, but the Italian church and civil authorities rashly promised to have the basilica restored and open to the public again in time for Christmas 1999. The restoration cost was estimated at $60 million--the price, more or less, of a single Van Gogh, but not easy to raise. The aim of this show, then, is to remind the public of the Assisi disaster and of the urgency of its repair...
From the time it was founded in 1228, right after the canonization of St. Francis, the great basilica was showered with gifts of liturgical art. One may well ask how an order dedicated to holy poverty managed to raise the money to construct the basilica, fill it with frescoes and altarpieces by the most esteemed and expensive artists of the 13th century, and acquire the rich collection of chalices, reliquaries and the like that plumped out its treasure house--in sum, to turn the place into the biggest pilgrimage center in the late medieval world, after Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela...
...manuscripts from Louis IX, King of France (and later a saint himself); sumptuous tokens from the rulers of England, Germany and Spain, as well as the various lay and ecclesiastical bigwigs of Italy and the successive Popes themselves. The last person to leave a big gift of medieval Italian art to San Francesco was, oddly enough, a 20th century American who died in 1955--the collector-dealer Frederick Mason Perkins, a friend of Bernard Berenson...
...poor (themselves). All in all, what remains of the basilican treasury is only a fragment of its earlier glories. So one should not, perhaps, expect too much from this show. In any case, it bears only the slightest proportional relation to the bewildering and dense variety of works of art that are to be seen in the whole fabric of San Francesco--about the same ratio, you might say, that a crumb of saint's bone in one of its reliquaries does to the whole body...