“Love Not the World” Saint Francis as an Alter Christus in Late Medieval Italian Painting

This paper reassesses the iconography of Saint Francis as an alter Christus in late medieval Italian painting, focusing on a strand of imagery that depicted the saint together with the virtues of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and either the vices Avarice, Vainglory and Pride or a mappa mundi motif. By gathering together surviving examples, some never published before, it is possible to place Sassetta’s famous image of Saint Francis in Glory (part of the high altarpiece for the Franciscan church in Sansepolcro, painted 1439-1444, now Villa I Tatti, Settignano) within a broader iconographic tradition that can be traced back into the fourteenth century. I suggest that precedents for Sassetta’s iconography can be identified in two paintings commissioned by the Order at the very start of the fifteenth century: a fresco on the facade of San Francesco in Fiesole, illustrated here for the first time, and a now-lost high altarpiece painted for the Franciscan church in Città di Castello, which can be reconstructed thanks to sixteenth-century intarsia copies of its imagery.