Master of Saint Francis

Nobody knows this painter's name. In 1885 the German art historian Henry Thode grouped a set of pictures around one panel kept at Santa Maria degli Angeli, the great church below Assisi that encloses the spot where Saint Francis died, and named their author after it. The panel shows Francis standing between two angels, and the open book in his hands reads, in Latin, "This was my bed when I was living and when I was dying." It is probably the earliest surviving image of Francis with all five wounds of the stigmata.

The rest is pieced together from style. He painted the earliest frescoes in the nave of the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi, five scenes of Christ's Passion facing five from the life of Francis, so that the saint's life answers Christ's across the nave. Several were badly damaged in the early 1300s, when the walls were opened up for new side chapels. He also painted large crosses for Franciscan churches in Umbria, and one of them, now in the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia, is dated 1272, the only year firmly attached to his name.