Description:
When an earthquake shook the town of Assisi on September 26, l997, it destroyed three sections of the vault in the 800-year-old Basilica of St. Francis. Although many of the contents were lost, such as the frescoes of St. Jerome and St. Matthew, this book preserves the whole interior, both in clear, sensitively-arranged color photographs and in an extensive text by the eloquent Angiola Romanini, the University of Rome art historian. The Basilica of St. Francis is a treasure trove of paintings by Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Cimabue, Giotto, and others. The "birthplace of a new age in painting and in European art," the frescoes demonstrate the shift from the flattened, stylized figures of the Byzantine late Middle Ages to the three-dimensional, individualized pictures of men and women that signal the beginning of the Renaissance. Romanini's text is scholarly and complete, with footnotes in the accepted academic style, but her passion comes through in her prose. She describes Cimabue's frescoes as "a scene change that wipes the northern tradition off the stage, as though it were an irretrievably finished age." The Basilica's sense of peace, much remarked on by visitors for centuries, was shattered by the fallen sections of its vault. But the church of the gentle saint, pictured with his congregation of attentive birds, is still largely intact. This is not a book for the casual tourist, but it may inspire a few art lovers to make it the centerpiece of their next pilgrimage to Italy. --Peggy Moorman
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