The fascination of St Francis

VISUAL ART: Arthur Boyd: Tapestries of the Life of St Francis of Assisi. Newman College Chapel, The University of Melbourne, to 4 December

VISUAL ART: Arthur Boyd: Tapestries of the Life of St Francis of Assisi. Newman College Chapel, The University of Melbourne, to 4 December

IT is unusual for an artist of the fame of Arthur Boyd to have a substantial suite of work consigned to the basement of a national museum, but that is essentially what has happened to the 20 large tapestries of the life of St Francis of Assisi woven at a celebrated workshop in Portugal between 1972 and 1974, purchased by the National Gallery of Australia the following year, and hardly heard of since.

Now, for almost the first time, eight of the St Francis tapestries can be appreciated in the sympathetic environment of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, at Melbourne University's Newman College.

The proportions of the space are grand without being cavernous, and the luminous tapestries stand out more vividly against the grey stone than they would in the neutral white of a gallery.

St Francis is one of the best loved of the Christian saints. He founded his order of mendicant friars in the 13th century, at about the same time that St Dominic established the Dominicans. Unlike the enclosed orders of monks, the friars of the high middle ages were involved in the social life of the new or renascent cities of Europe.

It is a testimony to their success that in countless Italian cities, the biggest churches after the cathedral itself will be those of the two preaching orders: thus in Florence, the Franciscan Santa Croce and the Dominican Santa Maria Novella; in Venice, the Franciscan Frari and the Dominican San Zanipolo.

In art, one can always distinguish the rough brown or grey habits of the Franciscans, with their rope belts and sandals, from the crisp black and white of the Dominicans. The character of the two founders, and of the orders they established, was similarly different.

The Dominicans were for centuries the intellectuals of the church; one of their number was St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. St Francis, on the other hand, taught humility and self-abnegation.

The holiness of his life was such that he is supposed to have received the stigmata, the marks of Christ's wounds.

Each of us is likely to be constitutionally drawn to one of these models in preference to the other, and Boyd, who was a passionate man but no intellectual, was without doubt more attuned to the Franciscan than the Dominican. His interest in the saint went back at least to the early 1960s, when he originally executed the colour pastels for a biography of Francis to be published by Thames and Hudson.

Colour reproduction of the whole series was deemed too expensive, so Boyd executed a series of black and white lithographs, loosely based on the pastels, sold as a limited edition and reproduced in the book, which came out in 1968. The pastels too were sold, but high quality transparencies were later used to make the cartoons for the Portuguese tapestries. Boyd was instinctively drawn to St Francis' particular

capacity for empathy and communion, not only with the human and the divine, but with nature and the animal world. In the story of the wolf of Gubbio, for example, whose traditional iconography can look quaint to modern eyes, Boyd imagines the gentle saint and the fierce wolf as though merged into a single being; and we see that love and mystical connectedness are also ferocious, intense experiences.

In other cases, as when Francis holds St Clare's long golden hair, or in the vision of the church on fire, spiritual communion verges on the sexual.

Piety is not primness, nor is celibacy the same as sexual neutrality. Other religions have seen this too: one need only reflect that a virgin goddess such as Artemis has as strong a sexual charge as Aphrodite; one that is no less powerful for being potential rather than actual.

Boyd discovers in these subjects an experience of ecstasy that he embodies in a palette composed almost exclusively of reds and yellows and white: the effect is of fire - literally a motif in several cases - and the images emerge out of this intense glow like momentary visions in the licking flames of a wood fire.

One thinks, although Yeats was writing of the gold of mosaics, of his "sages standing in God's holy fire".

Perhaps Boyd's tapestries will eventually be shown in a dedicated gallery at the NGA, even one where half the series could be shown in alternation.

But in truth, the effect is greater in the church than in the inert environment of an art museum, both because they are seen on their own, rather than when the eyes are tired and confused by disparate material, and because the solemnity of the place predisposes the mind to a different kind of engagement.