Saint Francis Gives the Rule to the Poor Clares

This long, low panel once sat beneath an altarpiece, in the strip called the predella, where small scenes told what the main picture had no room for. Paolo Morando painted the altarpiece in 1522 for the Franciscan tertiaries of San Bernardino in Verona, lay men and women who followed a rule of Francis while living in the world. Its predella had three scenes. In this one Francis hands the rule, a small red book, to the Poor Clares, the enclosed nuns who followed Saint Clare, kneeling on either side of an altar.

A second scene, Francis dictating the rule of the tertiaries themselves, is now in Budapest, and the third, Francis with his friars, is presumed lost. Francis did give Clare's community a short form of life, but the full rule she wrote herself, and the pope approved it in 1253, two days before she died.