Basilica di San Francesco

The Basilica of San Francesco, a treasure chest of one of the absolute masterpieces of Italian art, houses one of the most famous and world-renowned Renaissance painting cycles, the Legend of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca.

The cycle, realised by the artist between 1452 and 1466, does not follow a narrative sequence and the episodes are not connected according to chronological succession, but by formal and symbolic relationships. The scenes, articulated in three levels on the walls of the Bacci Chapel, are characterised by a careful perspective vision and tell the story of the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, starting from the birth of the tree from which the wood with which it was built came. The episodes are taken from the Legenda Aurea by the Dominican friar Jacopo da Varagine, a collection of lives of saints and explanations of liturgical feasts written from the 1360s onwards and circulated with great success throughout the Middle Ages.
Inside the Basilica of San Francesco, in addition to Piero della Francesca’s masterpiece, many other noteworthy works are preserved, including the large painted Cross, now suspended above the high altar. Dating back to the eighth-ninth decade of the 13th century, when the present church was still under construction, it is attributed to an Umbrian painter conventionally known as the Master of St. Francis. The cross depicts the Christus patiens, i.e. the suffering Christ, with Saint Francis in adoration kneeling at his feet.