Event date: Tuesday 10 November 2026
Link expires: Friday 11 December 2026

Please ensure you allow enough time to watch the recording before the link expires.

2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, who is without doubt one of the most beloved of all saints and no more so than for the patrons and practitioners of architecture, sculpture and painting. In these two ARTscapades lectures Clare Ford-Wille explores how, scarcely twenty years after his death altarpieces and fresco cycles began to show his life and miracles. Indeed, by studying his image alone across the history of western art it is possible to trace the different artistic styles and ideas from the late 13th to the 19th centuries.

We begin with the tempera panels and fresco cycles in Assisi and Florence of the late 13th and 14th centuries. His image is then explored further in the magnificent altarpieces from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards and the myriad of ways in which St Francis appears in the work of so many artists from Giotto to Jan van Eyck, Giovanni Bellini, Correggio, Raphael and Zurbarán, to name but a few.