ABSTRACT
The coincidence of the sack of Constantinople with the rise of the Franciscans and its revitalisation of Joachimite apocalyptism through the Tuscan ‘maniera greca’ left a mark on the Franciscan movement lasting in a way until our days. The image of a suffering Christ on the cross has become so much identified with Franciscan spirituality that it still in our days requires redressing. In her important though misleadingly titled 1993 book Francis and the invention of the stigmas Chiara Frugoni argues, closely following Norbert Nguyen-VanKhanh, that the centre of the meditations of St Francis was never the isolated Christ, let alone a dead body contorted by suffering, rather always the Trinity (Frugoni 1993: 116-17). Within the Trinity Francis privileged the Father, emphasising his love and the obedience of the Son in following his will (Ibid.: 122), as the ‘central focus of [his] meditations were [. . .] not the suffering humanity of Christ, but the love of the Father’ (Ibid.: 148). This is why the centre of his meditations was the mystery of the Incarnation, and even on the scene of the Passion he was focusing on the ‘generosity of that act of divine love’, rather than on the dolours of human suffering (Ibid.: 73). These meditations were better served by the painted crosses, one of which ‘talked’ to him according to a well-known legend, showing a ‘body that was truly human but indifferent to suffering’, thus calling observers to ‘soften compassion and the physical identification with the dolour’, rather than a wholesale abandonment to emotions of sufferance (Ibid.: 122). For this same reason his preferred cross was Tau-shaped, standing as a symbol of protection of salvation, but not physical dolour (Ibid.: 148); a shape that would be faithfully reproduced by Giotto.
