St Francis by Margaritone 1250
Little is known of Margaritone's life. The only documentary record of
his existence dates from 1262, when he lived in Arezzo. However, a fair number
of his works are known to survive; unusually for the time, most are signed.
Their nature and distribution indicate that Margaritone was much in demand as
an artist, both in Arezzo and throughout Tuscany. Outside Italy, his fame rests
mainly on his entry in Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists.
Margaritone's style is uniquely identifiable, standing as it does
outside the mainstream of 13th-century Italian painting. His work has at times been
dismissed as reactionary and provincial, and indeed he was often held up by
critics in the 19th century as a prime example of the supposed “barbarism” of
late Byzantine painting. Given the lack of surviving dates, no clear chronology
for his career has yet been established. Paintings by Margaritone are held at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the National Gallery,
London; in addition, a number of works may be found at sites around Arezzo. His
signature reads “MARGARIT___RITIO ME FECIT.” Margaritone’s given name was
Margarito, but it was transcribed erroneously by Vasari as “Margaritone,” the
name by which he is known today.
In one of his known panels, Saint Francis is depicted standing and
looking slightly away from the viewer, holding the Holy Scriptures in his right
hand as if he were about to place them within the folds of his habit. The
fingers of his left hand stretch outward in a gesture of blessing, revealing
the marks of the stigmata. Although the saint is crowned with a halo, this
painting is thought to date very near to his lifetime, or only a few years
after his death — an extraordinary closeness that lends the image a sense of
immediacy and reverence, as though painted in living memory of the Poverello
himself.
A secondary version of this same composition is also known to exist,
possibly produced within Margaritone’s workshop or by a follower closely
associated with him. Its nearly identical arrangement — from the saint’s pose
to the folds of his robe and the gesture of his blessing hand — suggests it was
modeled directly after the original. This repetition testifies to the enduring
influence of Margaritone’s vision of Saint Francis, one of the earliest to
define the saint’s visual presence in Italian art.
This image is a public domain image, which means either that copyright has expired in the image or the copyright holder has waived their copyright. Franciscan Gallery charges for the access to high resolution copy of the image. Manually restoration was necessary in order to improve quality, without covering the original image.
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