The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon

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 this in the portrayal of the Boy as a recipient of alms found in the Meditationes vitae Christi. The depiction of Jesus as a Franciscan can also be seen in an early fourteenth-century painting of the Madonna and Child, ascribed to the Primo Maestro di Santa Chiara, now in the Museo Diocesano in Spoleto. Here the Christ Child is dressed as a Franciscan, with brown wool habit, triple-knotted cord, and bare feet.¹⁵⁴ The anonymous author of the late thirteenth-century Meditatio pauperis in solitudine emphasizes Christ’s Franciscanism even more explicitly, stating that Christ “was the first and true Lesser Brother (frater minor) according to the perfection of the … virtues [viz., poverty, love and humility] which shone out in him in a most perfect way.”¹⁵⁵

      The Christ Child—Alive Again—at Greccio

      Having made the case that Francis and Clare sought to imitate the Christ Child, particularly the Infant’s embrace of poverty, I will now consider the famous episode at Greccio on Christmas Eve in 1223. On this occasion, Francis celebrated the feast of the Nativity with an outdoor Mass, using props and the setting of nature to help his audience visualize the first Christmas, when the Son of God came forth from Mary’s womb to live among humans—a descent of the divine to earth that was later repeated by Christ’s embodiment in the Eucharist. The saint’s motives for orchestrating a celebration of Christmas that was certainly more dramatic than usual were, in my view, primarily devotional: he wished to draw his audience’s attention to the virtues of the Christ Child, which he himself had cultivated for many years, to awaken the participants’ piety toward the baby Jesus, and to help them realize that the Child was perpetually in their midst and accessible to them, in the consecrated Eucharistic host.

      Franciscan belief in the comforting and indeed unfailingly protective presence of the child Jesus hidden within the Eucharist is dramatically illustrated by a story told about how St. Clare once pleaded with the Lord, before the Eucharistic host, that he defend the nuns from the Saracens who were on the verge of invading her convent of San Damiano. In the most detailed account of this incident that survives, a chapter from the Legend of Saint Clare, it is the Christ Child who answers her prayers: a voice, “as if of a little child,” resounded in her ears: “I will always defend you.” So even when the child Jesus was not audible or visible to his devotees, he continually watched over them through his abiding presence in the Eucharist.¹⁵⁶ Fourteenth-century frescoes depicting this incident, in the oratory of the convent of San Damiano, depict Clare and her nuns kneeling before the Christ Child, who stands in the niche where a tabernacle or pyx used to be kept. The nuns’ reliance upon the power of the Christ Child, who blesses the sisters with his right hand, is vividly commemorated in this scene (fig. 9).¹⁵⁷

      Belief in the Christ Child’s presence in the Eucharist and a commemoration of the deprivations attending his Nativity, rather than his mighty power, stressed in the aforesaid tale about Clare and her convent, is central to the early accounts of the Christmas celebration at Greccio. In what follows, I will focus on Francis’s devotional motives, seeking to deduce from details found in the legendary accounts of the episode what he most admired about the Christ Child. In this section, I will cite the description of the event at Greccio that Thomas of Celano provides at the end of Book One of his Vita prima, since this is