Francesco: 800 years of images under a blue sky. The exhibition in Arezzo

Make the most of the headings straight away, then focus on the ‘Percorso Espositivo’ and get started. Begin with Giotto; the initial impact lies in that blue, now bereft of stars yet filled with dancing demons in the skies above Arezzo. Start with Giotto’s Legenda Major in Assisi and proceed to the representation of Francis in Arezzo, depicted through his first 800 years of life in benevolent images. The vibration is life, and it is not gentle; the image is the image, and so on. The focus, of course, is the image. The image of Francis, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, constitutes the exhibition itself, spread across the two venues of the Art Gallery and the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Arezzo. It is a journey in which something remains unchanging, whether within or without: the sky of the heart. And may peace be upon the souls of Horace, Seneca, Lucretius – all of them.

We change neither the spirit nor the sky. In the exhibition, the sky softens the tone, embodying both eternity and reality: bold, instinctive, its chest slightly bare, with an air of smoothness, of intangibility. For it does indeed have a tone, as it spreads out behind the paintings and behind the works that span these very long centuries in the form of corridors. And when you leave the gallery to spend a little time within the Baroque of Sant’Ignazio, the sky remains, whether it is an image or not. That vibration remains, upon which everything sits well – let alone a saint. And we would say – let’s say it – that the exhibition is: beautiful. The curator affirms as much to the audience, who stand eager and snap photographs: say it, tell everyone it is beautiful. The epithet is apt; it captures the reality: she, the talented curator, has taken care of the image of Francis. A theatre, she says, where saints enter and exit from all sides, with mural twists and turns that make you want to bang your head against them. There are the great masters of the brushstroke who, amiably, go about their craft: they paint Francis.

He does rather unorthodox things; they stop him, yet imagine him to be good-natured. From Vasari to Botticelli, the della Robbia family, the Carracci, Guercino, a Barocci from the Met in New York – sixty works on display (including the Baroque altarpieces, ah, the altarpieces!) – and then the 20th century, in the final room, with Gio Ponti’s saint (here the blue background is lost; there are dry-stone walls, but the window looks out onto life, onto the real sky, which is so blue), moving on to Beato Angelico’s masterful and, I believe, painful yet good-natured depiction of the stigmata (here there is a double sanctity and you can see it: flat and planed yet ecstatic; perhaps the smallest and most beautiful painting, that tiny ‘whole’ which conveys the idea of a certain vastness – a certain vastness, precisely, not that of the sky)Francis defines the modernity of the icons; this exhibition shows us just that (and it is deliberately repetitive because this is precisely what the image is capable of doing: it repeats, freezes the gesture, replicating it). There are many themes, says the curator, which revolve around the figure of Francis. Many, as it happens, linked to current affairs. The themes and images are constantly intertwined, in that simple gesture of repetition, albeit a varied one. Unconnected, however, is that absolute sky, detached from everything, that blue which torments the eye. And whilst the young Francesco set off together with the angel, the dog too set off with them (according to Tobias).

As they walked together, the first evening took them by surprise, with its hues, the one that comes true. How many images, how many to speak of Francesco? Eight hundred years of images, and the beauty of it (we are aesthetic ascetics) is that it is not over yet. And how many words, on the other hand, to express love? No words and no imagery; for today, the blue sky is enough – always the same, yet never repeating itself.