ABSTRACT
As a cloth merchant himself, the young Saint Francis dressed lavishly. According to The Legend of Three Companions, “He was so vain in seeking to stand out that sometimes he had the most expensive material sewed together with the cheapest cloth onto the same garment”. The popular image and official iconography of Francis—sometimes surrounded by animals, possibly with birds perched on his shoulder, but always clad in a humble cassock tied with a crude rope—is one of harmony and congruity. To begin with, the habit that inspired so much passion and devotion, the one Francis wore on that day on Mount La Verna, was not the one he was wearing when he returned to Assisi. In a breathtaking leap, Salvatore Vitale concludes that, since a similar contact was made with the “tissue” of Francis’s flesh as with the linen of the shroud, Christ transformed Francis into “a Living Shroud”.
