This was not an original conception of Giotto’s or Dante’s. They only gave a more artistic expression to the popular belief. There was not a cottage in Umbria that did not believe in these espousals of St. Francis with Lady Poverty, who had, says the Divine Poet, lived more than a thousand years bereft of her first bridegroom, Christ; and it was from the lips of the poor and lowly they gathered the significant allegory. It was also before their time St. Bonaventura wrote: “St. Francis, journeying to Siena in the broad plain between Campiglia and San Quirico, was encountered by three maidens in poor raiment, exactly resembling each other in age and appearance, who saluted him with the words: ‘Welcome, Lady Poverty,’ and suddenly disappeared. The brethren not irrationally concluded that
this apparition imported some mystery pertaining to St. Francis, and that by the three poor maidens were signified Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, the sum and beauty of evangelical perfection, all of which shone with equal and consummate lustre in the man of God, though he made the privilege of poverty his chief glory.”
Dante with all his pride, and Giotto with his repugnance to poverty, even when consecrated by religion, chose one of the most democratic of subjects when they depicted these sacred espousals of St. Francis; for it was the people he identified himself with in this union. He wedded for better and worse the sorrows and misery, the misfortunes and groans, of Italy,[193] and when dying,
“To his brotherhood,
As their just heritage, he gave in charge
His dearest Lady, and enjoined their love
And faith to her.”
The church teaches that the poor are Christ’s suffering members; that it is he who is hungered and athirst in the sick and destitute; to him is every alms given. St. Francis gave his whole being to Poverty thus identified with Christ—a bride chosen only by a few elect souls in these days of luxury and self-indulgence, but in whom the Christian philosophers of the middle ages found an infinite charm. Plato represents Love with bare feet and tattered, disordered garments, to signify the forgetfulness of self that gives all and reserves nothing. It is in this sense the choice of evangelical poverty is one of the highest expressions of love to God in the Catholic Church.
“O hidden riches! O prolific good!” exclaims Dante. And no one ever understood its value more
than St. Francis, the glorioso poverello di Christo, who was, says Bossuet, “perhaps the most desperate lover of poverty ever known in the church.”