All creatures great and small

The story of St Francis of Assisi has captured the imagination of artists, musicians and poets for 800 years. Mary Miers discovers that the saint who befriended animals was also a radical reformer, whose teachings have a timely relevance

- Mary Miers

PRESERVED on a splayed window in a small Kent church is a little-known image of St Francis made only a few decades after his death. This fragment in the chancel of Doddington parish church is unique among English 13thcentury wall paintings in that it depicts the saint with his stigmata. St Francis, wearing his emblematic habit and triple-knotted girdle, stands on bleeding feet with hands raised in prayer. Overhead is a wing of the celestial seraph, who is described as having hovered over him, ‘fiery as well as brilliant’, imprinting his body with the wounds of the crucified Christ. The unprecedented miracle, which was revealed on his death in 1226, elevated Francis into a Christ-like figure; he was canonised two years later.

The Kent mural is testament to the saint’s early reach, together with drawings of the friar with his brothers made on the manuscript Chronica Maiora by Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk at St Alban’s Abbey in Hertfordshire. It spread abroad even within his own lifetime—the first Franciscans to thrive outside Italy established a house in Canterbury in 1224 (the so-called Greyfriars). In the century following his death, the Franciscans fostered the cult of their founder through an astonishing body of panel and wall paintings that, paradoxically for one who renounced all earthly possessions, would play a formative role in the development of early-Renaissance art.