Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi

← Encyclopedia

The Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi is the church built over the tomb of Francis of Assisi, on a spur of hillside the friar himself is said to have asked for as a burial place too low and despised for a saint. Construction began in 1228, the year of his canonization and two years after his death; the lower church was finished within a few years, the upper church consecrated in 1253. From the start it served as the head church of the Franciscan Order and as the destination of pilgrimage to its founder — a role it has held without interruption to the present.

The building is two churches stacked on one another. The lower basilica, dim and low-vaulted, sits closest to the crypt where the saint’s remains were sealed in the rock; the upper basilica rises above it as a single luminous hall in the new Gothic manner. That arrangement was itself read as meaning: descent toward the tomb and the saint’s chosen humility, ascent toward light. The contrast between the two levels is the architecture giving form to the Franciscan paradox — that the way up was understood to run through poverty and the embrace of the lowest.

The walls carry one of the most consequential bodies of painting in European art. The upper church holds a fresco cycle of the life of Francis, long attributed to Giotto and his workshop, though the attribution has been debated by scholars for more than a century and remains unsettled. Whoever made them, the scenes mattered beyond Assisi: they rendered a recent, historical life — a man who had walked the same roads as the painters’ grandparents — with the weight once reserved for scripture, and they did so in a new pictorial language of solid bodies in real space. Together with the work of Cimabue in the same building, the cycle is treated as a hinge between medieval and Renaissance ways of seeing.

For the order and for pilgrims, the significance was never chiefly aesthetic. The basilica was the shrine of a man held to have received the stigmata — the wounds of Christ marked in his own flesh two years before his death — and the whole site was understood as the place where that conformity to Christ was made visible and venerable. The frescoes instructed the unlettered; the crypt held the relic; the double church staged the spiritual ascent the order taught.

The basilica was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. An earthquake in 1997 brought down sections of vault and killed several people inside, destroying frescoes that were afterward painstakingly reassembled from fragments. Restored, the church continues as both a working Franciscan sanctuary and one of the most visited religious sites in Italy. The hill the friar asked for as too low and despised for a saint now carries the basilica, and his body still lies in the rock beneath it.

→ Related: Middle Ages