Miracle of the Crib at Greccio

Name: Marco Yu Ming Chan Date: 6 September, 2012 Professor Kate Dimitrova The Work of Art. The Miracle of the Crib at Greccio (Legend of St. Francis- 13. Institution of the Crib at Greccio), Portrait by Giotto Di Bondone, 1297-1300, church of St. Francis, Assisi, Italy. Book Resources Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey. Finding Saint Francis in literature and art. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. The three authors created and edited this book a big collection of essays, which they are about St.
Francis, and some art works and texts about him, with the knowledge, tools and technics now-a-days, to study his life in a different view. William R. Cook. The art of the Franciscan Order in Italy. Leiden ; Boston : Brill 2005. Though the book is not directly about “The Miracle of the Crib at Greecio”, It’s about all the works related to St Francis. There are also some article that talks about this piece of work, and the different background of it. It’s combined by essays from The United States and The Great Britain, studying franciscan art in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy.
Essays Rosenthal Erwin, “The Crib of Greccio and Franciscan Realism” The Art Bulletin (Mar 1954): 57-60. This article begins with a research in 1926, explaining the differences of the view of the relationships between St. Francis, Nature and Art before and after the first quarter of the twentieth century. It talks about the old idea of how St. Francis respected and instructed nature (animals) and thinks it’s all connected with God, and how some art works like “The Cribs of Greecio” are so different and a new interpretation of his influence on arts.

Ursula Schlegel, “The Christchild as Devotional Image in Medieval Italian Sculpture: A Contribution to Ambrogio Lorenzetti Studies” The Art Bulletin (March 1970): 1-10. This article introduces and compare some pieces of art works that are related to St. Francis itself and the Christ. Some of them made St Francis to be the “second Christ” and some of them are showing the picture that he’s holding the Christ (the miracle in Greecio).
It talks a lot about what the relationship between those art works and the piece “Christchild”, but still, there are some informations and background about “The Miracle of the crib at Greecio”. Web Sites N/A. “Saint Francis cycle in the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi” wikimedia commons, March 2012.