ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between touch and sight in the representation of the patched Francisan habit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Touch was an important sense for Saint Francis. Francis used touch as a constant reminder of his body. Constance Classen has argued for the importance of touch in Christian piety through the pre-modern period, something that has been investigated by scholars such as Joe Moshenska, Erin Benay and Lisa Rafenelli, and Wietse de Boer and Christine Gottler, among others. Zaccaria Boverio, to whom Francisco Pacheco directs the reader, emphasizes that the habit as envisioned by Saint Francis was made with cheap cloth and could be patched with sackcloth. Yet the poverty of the habit, and particularly the patches, are evident in the prints of the habits contained in Boverio’s work, to which Pacheco referred in his Arte de la Pintura.
