Churches of Umbria

From Bill Thayer Web Site

The San Damiano Cross

The Cross that spoke to St. Francis of Assisi
The San Damiano Cross can be found in every friary, in Franciscan Universities, and in the home of, probably, every Secular Franciscan home in the world.
This cross is a reproduction of the crucifix through which God spoke to Saint Francis of Assisi in the year 1205, saying “Go, Francis, and repair my Church which, as you see, is falling into ruin.” At first Francis misunderstood and proceeded to repair only the San Damiano Chapel, where this crucifix was located. Eventually his acts of poverty, humility and charity brought about repairs to the entire Catholic Church.
The San Damiano Cross is a painting containing images of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and ascension into glory. Its thematic colors are red and black. Red, the color of Christ’s blood which he shed for us, symbolizes God’s love. Black is the color of death. The artist left us very little written explanation of his work, just names under the figures standing around the cross. The following interpretation of what his pictures represent is drawn mainly from several descriptions.

Giotto

GIOTTO (Ambrogio Bondone, detto) 1267 - 1337
In the field of Christian art, during the later Middle Ages, the Franciscan movement exercised considerable influence, especially in Italy. Several great painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially Cimabue and Giotto, who, though they were not friars, were spiritual sons of Francis in the wider sense, and the plastic masterpieces of the latter, as well as the architectural conceptions of both himself and his school, show the influence of Franciscan ideals. The Italian Gothic style, whose earliest important monument is the great convent church at Assise (built 1228–53), was cultivated as a rule principally by members of the order or men under their influence. Giotto has become the symbol of a profound renewal in the history of Western figurative arts, and of the first radical renewal since ancient Greece. "He converted the art of painting from Greek to Latin and brought in the modern era" - this is Cennino Cennini's synthesis fifty years after Giotto's death, underscoring the revolutionary character of Giotto's painting.
Born in 1267, he must have been active before the last decade of thirteenth century.