St. Francis

Margaritone d'Arezzo was one of the last major Italian painters working primarily in the Byzantine-influenced maniera greca before the Gothic revolution of Cimabue and Giotto. This panel of St. Francis in the Pinacoteca Vaticana depicts the saint with the austere, iconic frontality that characterized early Franciscan devotional imagery in the decades immediately following Francis's canonization in 1228. The work reflects the enormous demand for images of the new saint that swept through Italian churches in the mid-thirteenth century.

Painted in egg tempera on a gold ground panel, the figure of St. Francis displays Margaritone's characteristic style: large, staring eyes, rigid frontal pose, and flat linear drapery that owes more to Byzantine icon painting than to the nascent Gothic naturalism emerging elsewhere in Tuscany.