So wonderfully picturesque is every part of this Lower Church, that it is very difficult to give any idea of such a storehouse of early Italian art, for both Upper and Lower Churches seem to have been a rallying-ground for Giotto and his pupils, for the early Sienese masters, and for others following after Cimabue, Giunta Pisano, and the very early painters of Italy.
Fra Antonio, the sacristan, was a most kind and intelligent guide: pointing out to us the portrait of Francis, attributed to Giunta da Pisano, he took us into the sacristy, and let us see strips of old embroidery mounted on frames. The faces in this embroidery were beautifully rendered, and the colour was delightful. The Fra told us that some English ladies from Perugia had so greatly admired the old lace in the vestiary that he felt sure we should also like to see it; among it was some very fine point de Venise, used to trim surplices. I forget how old he said it was; some of the vestments were exquisitely embroidered.
THE SMALL CLOISTER, SAN FRANCESCO.
Then he opened a door, and we saw the quaintest little cloister, surrounded by the grey convent walls; the garden, in its grass-grown quadrangle, was seemingly left to itself. We spied out rosy cyclamen blossoms dotted among the grassed hollows of the rough ground, and our kind Fra, tucking up the skirts of his cassock, for at San Francesco the Franciscan habit is not worn, the conventual garb takes its place, stepped into the quad, and gathered a bunch of blossoms, which he presented to me, with tufts of maidenhair fern from the low wall of the cloistered garden. He asked my companions to come and dig up roots of both cyclamen and maidenhair.
"The Signori may as well have them," he said, with a sigh, "as those who set no store by them."
He was very kind, but we wondered what St. Francis would have thought about the change of costume and the comparative comfort of these guardians of his burial-place.
We went back into the basilica, and up a staircase which led to the east end of the Upper Church, built some twenty-one years after the Lower one. It is a beautiful and graceful example of early Gothic. The Pope's chair, near which we entered, is in red marble; the high altar at that time was surrounded by a screen, mass being no longer said there.