This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

By the time St Francis of Assisi died in 1226 he was a dominant and charismatic spiritual figure, celebrated for his stigmata, his relationship with animals and for founding the Franciscan order which had grown from 12 original adherents to more than 30,000 friars in a mere 15 years. Two years after his death aged 44, he was canonised.

Francis was also an exceptionally attractive figure to artists and thousands of illustrations of his life and deeds soon began to appear. This tradition, with scenes of his dramatic stigmatisation and his preaching to the birds as its key motifs, continued down the centuries. The rich iconography of the saint is now being celebrated at the National Gallery in London with exhibits that demonstrate both how enduring was his appeal and how he was seen by very different artists. 

The show includes such items as one of his own habits and images from the years immediately following his death and also paintings by Botticelli, Caravaggio and Jusepe de Ribera, alongside contemporary works by Anthony Gormley and the landscape artist Richard Long, who made a piece specially for the exhibition.

The greatest artworks inspired by Francis are, however, buildings and their decoration — the Upper and Lower Basilicas at Assisi. With the attached friary, the Sacro convento, they are filled with frescoes by some of the supreme painters of the early Renaissance — Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — and represent not just an extraordinary concentration of faith but an art historical textbook. 

The most spectacular of them are the 28 scenes depicting episodes from the life of the saint — an authorised biography in paint — designed and partly executed by Giotto (his authorship is disputed and documents covering the 1290s and early 1300s were destroyed when Napoleon’s troops stabled their horses in the Upper Basilica).

In 1997, one of the earthquakes that plague the Umbria-Marche region hit with unusual force. The two basilicas had survived 23 major quakes during their 800-year history, but not this one. Cracks immediately appeared and the church was closed so that a team of specialists and the friars in charge of the building’s fabric could inspect the damage. While they were doing so, an aftershock occurred and the result was catastrophic. 

An eyewitness reported that first the door jambs fell while “lurching first forward then back”, then two of the vaults collapsed bringing down large sections of the painted ceiling and killing four people — two of the friars and two of the specialists — who were trying to flee to the entrance. An apocalyptic video shot from within the church shows the moment the roof and plaster engulfed the scurrying figures and the cloud of dust that roiled along the nave.

Work to stabilise the building, in particular the facade, started immediately as did efforts to salvage all the painted material that could be found. Volunteers sifted through the 10-foot-high pile of rubble and put aside every piece of stone or plaster that held any trace of paint. 

While the Giotto fresco cycle suffered relatively minor damage, a further work by him and a fresco by Cimabue were totally destroyed. For the past 26 years work has been going on to restore the building and reconstitute the frescoes.

The efforts have been largely successful, although as with all restoration work, there were cavils too. Nevertheless, using a series of innovative techniques — polycarbonate casts, steel trusses, reinforced concrete roof purlins, aramid and epoxy resins, hydraulic connections — the integrity of the building was both reasserted and, to a degree, future-proofed against further quakes. 

The restoration of the art meanwhile was helped hugely by the fact that Panini, the Italian company best known for its stickers of footballers, had been photographing the paintings for a new publication and had finished their work only the night before the quake, so a full high-quality record was available. 

Any identifiable pieces of painted plaster were glued on to a canvas backing and put back on the new vaults. Using both the visual memory of the restorers and computer technology, 200 metres of fresco (80 per cent of the loss) have been re-established. However, in a mournful concrete restoration and storage area hidden behind the right-hand side of the nave wall sit racks of foam-lined plastic drawers, 874 of them, containing 300,000 fragments that have not been identified. 

There is no natural light and the place is a mortuary for stone and plaster. After more than two decades of work, Sergio Fusetti, the chief restorer, has given up hope that any more can now be done. 

Each and every fragment and mote of paint — many a matter of millimetres across — has been photographed at 1:1 scale, catalogued and put aside. The drawers hold a jigsaw which, says Fusetti, is far beyond the capabilities of the human eye and mind to complete. He is not, however, despairing. The limits of current possibilities may have been reached but, he told me, he hopes that AI might be developed to a point at which, in the future, sense can be made of the shards and the lost paintings reconstituted. 

The potential of technology is already evident elsewhere in the basilica: the luxury car company Ferrari is currently sponsoring the restoration of Cimabue’s Maesta in the Lower Basilica, a fresco that contains one of the earliest portraits of St Francis. “What we need,” says Fusetti, is not so much a Franciscan miracle but “more Formula 1 teams to come and help.”