Word: showing
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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...
...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...
...accessioning. They were apparently following their founder's injunction by selling what they had and giving the proceeds to the 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...
Nevertheless, the show--which will be at the Met through June 27 and then move to San Francisco, appropriately enough, for the summer--has some exceptional things in it. Perhaps the finest of its paintings, and the most exuberantly fresh in its coloring, is a portion of what must have been one of the great 13th century Italian altarpieces. It is the work of an unidentified Umbrian artist known only as the Master of St. Francis, and it shows a decided breakaway from Byzantine conventions in the modeling of its figures. In its scene of Christ's deposition from...
...single most dazzling object in the show is neither a reliquary nor a painting, nor even a manuscript illumination. It is the chalice made by the Sienese goldsmith Guccio di Mannaia, presented to the Franciscans by Pope Nicholas IV in the late 13th century. In design and workmanship it is more than a masterpiece--it's one of the greatest monuments of medieval art, standing only a little more than nine inches high. Its base, stem and bulb are decorated with some 80 tiny and exquisitely made enamel-glass plaques, representing mythical beasts, evangelists, angels, prophets and apostles. The gold...