Summary Of A New Saint A New Art

A New Saint, A New Art is a documentary film produced by Early Renaissance Productions in 2004 as a part of the series, First light: Tuscany and the dawn of the Renaissance. Authors of the documentary film are Jeff Siberry, Alberta Nokes, and Colm Feore. Narrator of the documentary is Monsignor, Timothy Verdon, an art historian at Canon Florence Duomor. Interviews are also featured with Franciscan Friar Maurice Richard, and Alexander Nagel, art historian at the University of Toronto. St. Francis of Assisi revolutionized Christianity in the 13th-century in Tuscany with his belief that Christ’s original message of poverty, chastity, and obedience should shape every person’s relationship with God. By doing
this, he played a major role in bringing about the Renaissance.
This documentary film explains how St. Francis caused Christian inspired artists of the period to put emotion and nature into their art and to produce naturalistic paintings that showed movement and feeling. This was totally different from prior art that was flat and one dimensional and did not show feelings or emotions. Francis Bernardone was born in Assisi, Italy in 1182, and was wealthy and wild in his youth. This all ended when he was taken prisoner in a war between his home of Assisi and Perugia. A year as a prisoner of war changed his whole life, and he went back home knowing that he wanted to live his life like Christ had. He became a good man and gave up all his wealth to help others and teach the importance of charity. Francis had always been very dramatic, and that did not change as he used theatrical actions to get his message across. When he decided to give up all his wealth, he took off his clothes in the public square to make it clear to everyone that he would no longer wear expensive clothes. Instead he chose to wear simple, homemade clothing like the Franciscan Friars who came to follow him wore and still wear today. His
faith was about emotion and feelings and doing what was best to help others. Francis was able to communicate his emotional approach to Christianity and his belief that the love of God was found in Nature.
He got his message across so well that his ideas revolutionized the style of painting from stiff, flat, formal images to life-like three dimensional art that was full of emotion and action. Francis established one of the most successful orders in the Catholic Church, the Franciscans, who spread the message of Francis with their missionary work to France, Spain, Egypt, and China. Pope Gregory IX declared Francis a Saint and laid the foundation stone himself of The Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi to let everyone know that the Catholic Church welcomed the Franciscan Order and its founder, Francis. Ironically, the Basilica in Assisi that was dedicated to one of the poorest and humblest of men, was amazingly beautiful and became the birthplace of a new art known as the St. Francis Legend. A series of 28 scenes is a huge art display showing the life of St. Francis and is one of the world’s most important works of art. The artists who painted the tribute depict the natural world that Francis loved and the emotions he felt and wanted others to feel. Naturalism and showing things like they really look became the goal of painting and is still the main objective for artists even today. I did enjoy the film and learned many new things
about St. Francis of Assisi. I had heard of him, of course; but I didn’t really know any of the details about his life. The film itself was not as well produced as the other films I have reviewed for this class. It kept cutting off, and I had to constantly restart it; so it actually took almost 2 hours to watch it instead of the 48 minutes it should have taken. The narrators sounded like they were just reading from a script and were rather boring. The pictures were strange and distracting most of the time. The narrator would be talking about 13th Century buildings and the film would be showing tourists in shorts with cameras inside a church and scenes outside would have lots of traffic and people dressed in modern clothing. I know there are no pictures that were taken in the 1200’s, but it seemed like they could have taken better pictures at a time when there wasn’t a lot of distracting traffic and loud tourists. The narrators were a little difficult to follow, because they almost spoke in a monotone that made it very boring to listen to them for such a long amount of time. Thank goodness, there was a copy of the transcript that I could follow as they spoke. That helped somewhat, but even it was hard to follow and distracting since it was written in all capital letters. Overall, it was an informative film with lots of interesting facts and information.