Assisi, fresh eggs

Pink and white stone, a typical
building in Assisi

We visited Assisi yesterday. It’s a short trip across the valley from where we are staying and it’s a trip to a gigantic irony. The 25,000 people who live in Assisi have inherited a beautiful city that attracts thousands of religious pilgrims and many more tourists who visit the city’s churches, museum, hotels, restaurants, resorts, and shops to celebrate the virtuous life of a local man who preached total and complete poverty. A little odd.

The city spills down the side of the mountains and is built out of blocks of light pink and white stone. As you drive across the valley through the farms and past the Barilla factory that manufactures pasta, the pink city shimmers in the distance. It’s embarrassing to write like this but the city is that beautiful.

A piazza in Assisi

We parked at the top of the city. Like other towns that attract lots of visitors, the Italians have built large underground parking garages that swallow up cars but do not mar the cityscapes. We parked, walked a few steps, and were in the ancient city with tour groups speaking many languages, school kids, pilgrims wearing plain tunics and sandals, all kinds of people but few cars and no parked cars visible.

San Francesco from above

The most significant church in Assisi is San Francesco, dedicated to St. Francis. The church, like the town, is grand and impressive. The church was begun shortly after the death of St. Francis and was controversial from the beginning for memorializing a simple life in such an opulent way. The construction was finished very quickly, in something like 70 years.

The church attracted the most famous artists of the time to decorate the interior, most of them from Florence. Two generations of artists were deeply involved. In the main part of the church the transept includes a crucifixion done by the late medieval painter, Cimabue, in the 1200s. The huge fresco is in poor shape; the colors are fallen off the painting but the drama of his portrayal of the event is clear. The composition of the ghostly figures is haunting.

The Crucifixion by Cimabue

The Florentine painters of the 1200s and 1300s took the visual arts in a new direction. Before the Florentines nameless artists repeated formulaic images of saints in heaven, Mary and Jesus in heaven, always in two dimensions against gold backgrounds indicating another world and another life. The Florentine artists set figures in this world and focussed on the human drama in the lives of religious figures. The new images portrayed an empirical perspective, a third dimension, a solidity to buildings and people. Not surprisingly mathematical perspective was discovered (invented?) by Florentines in the 1400s and the third dimension in paintings became perfectly convincing.

St. Francis renouncing
worldly goods

The next generation of painters after Cimabue took over in the late 1200s. Giotto, the great Florentine who pioneered a more natural appearing, more realistic style of painting, did a cycle of well over 20 huge frescoes describing the life of St. Francis. The frescoes tells stories from the life of the saint for an audience that was largely illiterate. The stories are told in a series of comic book frames with stage sets constructed by Giotto and include a host of characters. 

Giotto’s stage sets reflect the real world of central Italy. Giotto's first fresco is called Homage to a simple man and is set in front of what appears to be a Roman temple. In fact, there is a Roman temple to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and music, in the main piazza at the center of Assisi. No one who lived in Assisi would mistake the visual quotation.

Of course, the Roman temple to Minerva has been converted to a church.

Homage to a simple man

Though all this seems pretty ordinary in our eyes, Cimabue and Giotto invented a approach of painting that focused on the humanity of the scenes that they were depicting. Earlier painters had focused only on manipulating religious symbols but the new generations of the early Renaissance included real people and real towns and cities in their depictions.

In front of the former
 Roman temple to Minerva

There are sites on the internet with images of the complete Giotto cycle so we won’t post any further images here but please browse through this link to see all of the images in Giotto’s life of St. Francis.

A final note. Florence, the home of Giotto, has a certain palette of colors. Only a few buildings have natural brick faces; most buildings are covered in concrete and painted. The colors of the building exteriors are a narrow range of colors. The range of colors in Florence is from pale, pale yellow to pale tan, to pale, pale orange. No other colors and certainly no bold colors.

San Francesco from below Assisi

Umbria has a different look. Again most buildings are covered in concrete and are painted. But the Umbrian palette is a level or two more bold. The yellows are more forthright. The tans are more brown. The oranges begin to look orange. None of these colors are pure yellow or brown or orange but in Umbria the colors are more striking.

Also more striking are the colors of the stage-set buildings in Giotto’s scenes from the life of St. Francis. Giotto was among the first artists to focus on this life rather than the next life and was among the first to depict scenes of ordinary life in ordinary towns. His ordinary towns were ordinary central Italian towns. What strikes us is that the palette of colors used by Giotto in the backgrounds of his life of St. Francis cycle is the same palette as it used in Umbria towns today. That cannot be a coincidence.

For dinner tonight we had a fritatta. Made with fresh eggs. Very fresh eggs. Massimo runs the place in the Nonna Rana Country House where we are staying and yesterday asked us if we liked eggs. We said, “Yes” and he returned with five fresh eggs from the chickens that he and his wife keep in the back of the property. Just enough eggs to make a fritatta along with some zucchini, chopped prosciutto, and shredded pecorino cheese. We are in the country here.