Favourite Paintings: 'The Death of St Francis' by Giotto

One of my favourite paintings isn't really a painting at all, it's a fresco cycle by Giotto in the Bardi Chapel in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. The frescoes are about the life of St Francis and I've chosen the scene showing the death of the friar who soon afterwards became a saint.

I still remember my excitement at seeing a real Giotto chapel for the first time, exclaiming 'He invented art', when I realised what I was looking at and wanted to drink it all in with my eyes. Of course, art has been around for millennia before Giotto but he and a few other masters were pivotal in modernising art in the late middle ages that led to the Renaissance and the great flourishing of art one hundred years later.

Look at the friars gathered around the deathbed of their leader, the man they'd given up everything to follow, just like the Apostles gave up everything to follow their Lord. They were real men who knew the real Francis, not the legendary saint, faults and all. They don't look saintly and ethereal do they? They were real men, you and me, who happened to live in extraordinary times. They react differently, some seeming to be telling Francis to hold on a bit longer, some in tears, some in shock, just as you do when someone dies. This was part of Giotto's genius, his attempts at storytelling in a way that had never been done before, to show real people showing real emotion. It's an astonishing display of the imagination and the skills of the master.

The strange oblong of empty space in the centre of the fresco is the result of some stupid rich person wanting to be tried in that chapel so they hollowed out part of the wall to place his coffin in. Luckily they retained the original fresco so it could be replaced at a later date. Just underneath the fresco is a line that runs round the entire chapel showing the highest point the water reached when the Arno overflowed its banks in 1966 and flooded Florence. I wonder what intervention prevented it reaching these amazing frescoes?

When you've drunk in as much as you can of the chapel, walk back maybe 20-30 yards and look up at the top of the chapel and, on the walls of the church you'll see another fresco by Giotto, this time a very big painting of St Francis receiving the stigmata. The seraph is flying overhead and beams of light transfer the stigmata of Christ to St Francis. You can't get close enough to see the detail since it's so high up on the walls but there's a similar painting on a panel in the Louvre in Paris that you can get close to.