Funeral of St. Francis

The Funeral of Saint Francis depicts the scene from Bonaventure's Legenda Maior in which the body of the founder of the Franciscan order is borne through the streets of Assisi before burial — a narrative that Giotto had made one of the most familiar in Italian painting through the Arena Chapel and Assisi cycles. Bicci di Lorenzo's version belongs to the long tradition of Franciscan narrative painting produced for the order's churches and friaries, a market his workshop served consistently. His treatment necessarily operates in the shadow of the great Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi cycles that had defined the subject, though he inflects it with the more decorative Florentine sensibility of the early 15th century.

The funeral procession as narrative subject requires the management of a horizontal sequence of figures — clergy, mourners, the bier — within a vertical panel format. Bicci di Lorenzo arranges them in the compressed, hierarchical manner of his school, with gold vestments providing decorative richness against the somber subject.