ABSTRACT
Many scholars have nonetheless seen the influence of Bonaventure in the bold decision to parallel the lives of Francis and Christ on opposite sides of the nave. The most significant work of Franciscan art that bears a date from the period of Bonaventure’s generalate is a very large painted crucifix, over sixteen feet tall, in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. More promising ground in the search for a Bonaventuran art would seem to be works by the Maestro di San Francesco in the Basilica at Assisi, which Bonaventure visited on several occasions as minister general, and in whose decoration he might be expected to have taken a particular interest. Ruth Wolff has meanwhile argued that the scene of the Stigmatization in the Lower Church reflects Bonaventure’s thinking about the stigmata, also implying a date after the writing of the Legenda Maior.
