from Egypt, “the boy was embarrassed … but out of his love of poverty, he opened his hand, shamefacedly accepted the money and expressed thanks.”138 The implication is that by going against his natural disinclination to accept handouts, the Christ Child reveals his love of poverty as well as his nobility.139 In the depiction of this incident in the well-known illustrated manuscript containing an Italian version of the Meditationes (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ital. 115, fol. 45r; fig. 6), a small-looking Christ Child (who, according to the text, would be about nine years old) appears a bit overwhelmed by the situation, as he opens his hand to receive money from an old man standing behind him.140 Aelred of Rievaulx had earlier suggested that the young Jesus had begged for necessities, specifically during his three-day sojourn in Jerusalem, yet he did not elaborate on that detail.141 Just as Francis and his followers can be said to have acted like the child Jesus by begging, so, by wearing “poor clothes” patched “with sackcloth and other pieces” (namely, “a tunic with a hood”),142 they arguably patterned themselves after the newborn Christ Child, who was humbly wrapped with swaddling clothes (Lk. 2:7).
While Francis himself, in the surviving texts written by him, does not explicitly speak about the strips of fabric Mary used to swaddle her infant, his disciple Clare of Assisi did. In the monastic Rule she wrote for her sisters, Clare emphasizes that the infant Jesus was scantily covered, a detail she weaves into her instructions concerning the nuns’ clothing: “Out of love of the most holy and beloved Child wrapped in poor swaddling clothes (pauperculis panniculis involutus) and placed in a manger and of his most holy mother, I admonish, beg, and encourage my sisters to wear poor garments.”143 Similarly, in her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague (a Bohemian princess who had become a Poor Clare nun around twenty years earlier), Clare urges her to contemplate Christ, her heavenly spouse: “Look, I say, at the border of this mirror, that is, the poverty of him who was placed in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes (in panniculis involutus). O marvelous humility! O astonishing poverty! The King of angels, the Lord of heaven and earth, is laid in a manger!”144 Clare’s use of the diminutive form of the word panni (“strips of fabric”), which appears in Luke 2:7, is suggestive of rags, or at least of paltry pieces of cloth—pitiful strips of fabric that barely, and not at all worthily, cover the royal Babe.145 Like Francis, Clare calls attention to the Infant’s royalty, which makes the humble conditions of the Nativity seem even more astonishing. Moreover, such a characterization emphasizes the nobility of Agnes’s heavenly spouse, a fitting match for a princess. Just as Francis was extremely ascetic as regards his use of clothing, occasionally appearing naked in public and instructing other friars to do so, as a form of penance,146 so Clare, a woman of the nobility, “was content with only one tunic of lazzo (a rough fabric) and one mantle,” as a witness testified in Clare’s Process of Canonization.147 Modestly wearing her rough-hewn garment, in deference to social norms, Clare nevertheless boldly envisioned herself fighting naked against the devil.148 Although Francis himself does not employ the image of pankration, as Clare rather remarkably does, they both seem to have thought of Christ’s poverty as fundamentally consisting of a lack of clothing.
Figure 6. The Christ Child accepting alms, in an illustrated manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi. Paris, BnF, ital. 115, fol. 45r (fourteenth century). By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
That Francis’s fellow friars thought of him as a mirror image of the Christ Child is indicated by the comparisons they made between Francis and the baby Jesus. Franciscan sources recount how Lady Jacoba, an ardent admirer of Francis, was mystically summoned to the saint as he approached death. She brought fabric for his burial shroud, wax and incense for his funeral, as well as the ingredients needed for making the confection (marzipan) that Francis was extremely fond of. Although Lady Jacoba was a solo bringer of provisions for the one she so admired, the sources compare her to the Three Kings who offered gifts to the child Jesus. In his request for sweets (and his lack of fear of death), Francis seems childlike, yet he resembles the Christ Child most properly in his embrace of poverty. As the Assisi Compilation states: the Lord “inspired the Kings to travel with gifts to honor the child, his beloved Son, in the days of his birth and his poverty. So too he willed to inspire this noble lady in a faraway region to travel with gifts to honor and venerate” the body of Francis, “who loved the poverty of his beloved Son with so much fervor and love in life and in death.”149
Francis’s admirers extended the comparison of the saint to the Christ Child even further in the following century, when they claimed that Francis was born in a stable, in proximity to an ox and an ass. According to legend, when his mother Lady Pica came to term but had not yet entered into labor, she was told by a mysterious stranger, who knocked at the door, that she should leave her chamber and go into the stable where she would be able to give birth. Today, in Assisi, one can still read the following inscription over the door of the chapel S. Francesco il Piccolo: “This oratory was the stable of the ox and the ass in which St. Francis, the mirror of the world, was born.”150 Although the legend seems to have emerged only in the second half of the fourteenth century and the house of Pietro Bernardone, Francis’s father, was apparently located elsewhere in the town of Assisi, the tale about Francis’s birth remains valuable since it reveals how Francis’s life was believed to mirror Christ’s at its very beginning, not simply later on, most visibly when he received the stigmata. The Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli (d. 1452) transmits this legend in his cycle on the life of St. Francis that adorns the sanctuary walls of the church of S. Francesco in Montefalco (fig. 7).151 Significantly, a handmaiden who has just given the newborn Francis his first bath holds him up naked so that the other women, and also animals in attendance, may see this remarkably Christ-like child. Francis’s birth, like that of other infants destined to become saints, was accompanied by a mysterious occurrence that presaged his future career: following his conversion in his youth, Francis earnestly imitated Christ’s lowliness (including his nakedness) and strove to spread love of the baby Jesus.152 Francis is similarly likened to the Christ Child in a pair of late thirteenth-century stained glass lancets in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi; in parallel fashion, the windows represent a standing figure holding a smaller, child(like) figure (fig. 8). On the left, Christ with a crossed nimbus embraces an adult yet miniature version of Francis of Assisi bearing the stigmata, who, as it were floating before Christ, holds a book and a cross. On the right, the Virgin holds the Christ Child frontally, almost as if he were seated on her lap, while his hands are basically in the same position as those of Francis. The suggestion is that Francis is the perfect image of Christ by virtue of sharing in his sufferings at the Passion and also by imitating the Christ Child. Furthermore, the image encourages the viewer to regard Francis as maternally cared for by Jesus and also as a brother to the Christ Child.153 From such examples we can see how, from the perspective of Francis’s followers, he and Christ were mirror images of each other.
Figure 7. The legendary birth of Francis of Assisi in a stable. Fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, Church of S. Francesco, Montefalco (fifteenth century). By permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 8. St. Francis of Assisi held by Christ; the Christ Child held by Mary. Stained glass lancets, Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi (late thirteenth century). By permission of G. Ruf, www.assisi.de.
The merging of the figures of Francis and the Christ Child is also manifested in another way: in the attribution to the child Jesus of Franciscan features. We have already encountered an example of
