Visitors can view the rare St. Francis Missal on display as part of the Divine Inspiration exhibition at the Walters Art Museum. Image: Walters Art Museum
In Divine Inspiration: The Legacy of the St. Francis Missal, a rare medieval manuscript anchors a wider examination of devotion, artistic memory, and the challenges of preserving sacred objects.
BY KAZEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON
What makes an object sacred: its physical connection to a revered figure, the stories accumulated around it, or the devotion it inspires across generations? At the Walters Art Museum, the St. Francis Missal brings these questions into focus.
Divine Inspiration: The Legacy of the St. Francis Missal places a fragile medieval liturgical book at the center of a presentation exploring the enduring influence of St. Francis of Assisi. Alongside the manuscript, 18 additional objects—including paintings, manuscripts, and works in glass, ivory, and ceramic—trace how the saint inspired generations of artists and believers.
The timing is significant. October 3, 2026, marks 800 years since the saint’s death. Yet the presentation reaches beyond commemoration to examine the relationship between historical evidence and belief and the ways material objects preserve both.
The St. Francis Missal Begins With a Compelling Mystery
Produced in Italy around 1200, the St. Francis Missal is a liturgical book containing texts and instructions used in the celebration of Mass. Its historical importance rests partly on a tradition linking it to a pivotal episode in the saint’s life.
According to early accounts, Francis and two companions sought divine guidance in 1208. At the church of San Nicolò in Assisi, they opened a book on the altar three times. Each passage, the story relates, urged them to renounce worldly possessions. The episode helped shape the spiritual commitment that would underpin the Franciscan movement.
Franciscans have traditionally identified the Walters’ manuscript as the book consulted during that encounter. An inscription connects it to San Nicolò and names Gerard of Ugo as its patron. These details provide historical context for the tradition, although they do not conclusively establish the book’s identity.
Beyond Provenance: The Enigmatic Legacy of the Missal
That distinction matters. A work can carry enormous religious and cultural significance without every element of its traditional history being demonstrable. Indeed, the uncertainty surrounding the missal adds another dimension to its story. Visitors are invited to consider not only what the manuscript may have witnessed, but also how generations of believers have understood its possible connection to the saint.
The distinction between a missal and a Gospel book also deserves attention. Historical accounts of Francis’s experience refer to a book of the Gospels, while the Walters manuscript is a missal. Scholars and commentators have questioned whether the surviving object can be identified with the volume described in those accounts. The available evidence should therefore be treated with care rather than as definitive proof.
The manuscript’s importance ultimately rests on more than a disputed identification. It offers a tangible point of entry into medieval Italian religious culture and the enduring power of stories that connect sacred figures to physical objects.
A Medieval Manuscript With a Remarkable Afterlife
The St. Francis Missal is not simply a container for religious texts. It is an artifact shaped by use, handling, and survival. Its parchment pages and handwritten contents belong to a period when books required specialized skills and considerable labor. A missal served a practical purpose during worship, but a particular volume could acquire significance far beyond its original function.
The Walters’ manuscript illustrates that transformation. Its association with Francis has made it an object of devotional interest, while its historical and artistic qualities have established its place within a major museum collection. The museum’s digital manuscript record allows readers to explore its history and physical features beyond the gallery.
That dual identity raises a productive question: what happens when an object used in religious practice becomes an object of public display?
In a church, a sacred book may be encountered through ritual, prayer, or pilgrimage. In a museum, it enters a different framework. Visitors approach it through historical interpretation, artistic appreciation, and conservation science. These perspectives need not conflict, but they change the terms of the encounter.
Divine Inspiration holds those approaches together. The missal can be studied as a medieval manuscript while remaining an object to which people attach spiritual meaning. Neither perspective fully replaces the other.
Conservation and the Survival of the St. Francis Missal
The manuscript’s fragility adds a practical dimension to its significance. Centuries of use weakened its binding, and by 2015 its condition had deteriorated to the point that it was too fragile to open or exhibit. In 2016, the Walters began a two-year conservation project to stabilize the book, with support from the Mellon Conservation Fellowship Fund.
This history is essential to understanding the presentation. Conservation is often treated as a technical process that takes place behind closed doors. Here, it becomes part of the object’s public story.
Preserving a medieval manuscript involves difficult decisions. Conservators must manage light exposure, restrict handling, and carefully control display time. Their goal is not simply to make an old book look presentable but to maintain its physical integrity so that future generations can study it.
There is an additional irony in the missal’s condition. If its association with Francis helped make it an object of devotion, centuries of attention and handling may also have contributed to its deterioration. The same human impulse that gives an artifact meaning can place its survival at risk.
The Walters’ conservation work illustrates the responsibility museums carry when making fragile collections accessible. The manuscript’s digital record and high-resolution images offer another way to study the book without repeatedly handling the original. Digital access cannot reproduce the experience of encountering a medieval artifact in person, but it can complement preservation by supporting closer study.
ARTCENTRON has explored related questions in its coverage of toxic materials in historic manuscript illuminations, which examines how the materials that give old books their visual richness can also create conservation challenges. Such research underscores the complex relationship between artistic beauty, material history, and the long-term care of cultural objects.
St. Francis in Medieval and Renaissance Art
The accompanying artworks broaden the historical scope beyond the manuscript itself. Rather than treating Francis as a figure confined to medieval religious life, they demonstrate how artists across different periods interpreted his identity and spiritual significance.
Among the highlights is El Greco’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, which depicts the saint experiencing a vision of the crucified Christ. El Greco emphasizes the spiritual intensity of the encounter through Francis’s wounded hands and transfixed gaze. The luminous apparition, elongated figure, and loose brushstrokes create an otherworldly atmosphere, reflecting the artist’s distinctive style and the mystical spirituality of the Counter-Reformation.
From Manuscript to Historical Witness
Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata shifts the focus from the manuscript as a possible historical witness to Francis as a subject of artistic imagination. Yet both works explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible: one preserves the written language of worship, while the other gives pictorial form to a religious experience. Readers interested in the artist’s wider career can explore ARTCENTRON’s overview of El Greco and other major European artists.
The presentation also includes Saint Anthony of Padua Taking the Habit of the Franciscan Order, attributed to the School of the Romagna. The painting shows Anthony kneeling before his superior as he exchanges his Augustinian habit for the brown garment of the Franciscans. The surrounding monks and elegantly dressed young men emphasize his religious transformation and the social world he leaves behind. Its carefully arranged figures and detailed church interior reflect Renaissance traditions of religious storytelling. Originally part of a predella, the panel likely belonged to an altarpiece in a Franciscan church.
These works help explain why Francis and his religious community remained compelling subjects for European artists. Their stories offered a visual language for exploring humility, sacrifice, contemplation, and the encounter between human experience and divine presence.
Where Image and Object Meet: Franciscan Relics
The Walters also presents a rare 14th-century diptych containing relics associated with Francis and other Franciscan saints, including St. Clare of Assisi. Portraits and inscriptions identify the figures connected with the relics. Here, image and material objects work together to establish religious significance.
A manuscript depicting Francis preaching to animals alongside Clare introduces another form of intimacy. The image of Francis’s face is damaged, possibly through devotional touching or kissing while the book was in use. Although the cause remains uncertain, the damage reminds viewers that medieval images were not always passive objects of observation. They could participate in acts of devotion.
These works deepen the story of the St. Francis Missal by demonstrating that religious art was never only about representation. Images, books, and relics could serve as instruments of memory, devotion, and communal identity. A broader perspective on this tradition emerges in ARTCENTRON’s account of medieval religious treasures from Hildesheim, which examines how churches used manuscripts, sculptures, and precious objects to express faith and authority.
The Paradox of Franciscan Material Culture
One of the most intriguing tensions concerns the material richness of religious objects associated with a figure remembered for renouncing worldly possessions.
Francis’s commitment to poverty sits uneasily beside the elaborate objects created to commemorate him. Manuscripts, paintings, reliquaries and decorative works require materials, labor and resources. Their survival often depends on institutions capable of protecting them.
Yet this tension need not diminish the art. Instead, it reveals how later communities translated a spiritual ideal into material form.
A saint’s rejection of wealth could inspire objects of considerable artistic value. Those objects, in turn, preserved and circulated the saint’s example. The result is a complex relationship between simplicity and ornament, spiritual aspiration and material investment.
The Walters brings that relationship into focus through works created for different purposes and audiences. The objects do not tell one uniform story about Francis. They reveal successive interpretations shaped by historical circumstances, religious practices and artistic conventions.
That variety is among the presentation’s strongest qualities. The missal provides a central point of reference, while the surrounding works demonstrate how the saint’s legacy expanded through different forms of artistic expression.
Why the St. Francis Missal Matters Today
The 800th anniversary of Francis’s death provides an occasion to revisit his legacy, but the significance of the Walters’ presentation extends beyond the commemorative calendar.
Its lasting interest lies in the questions it raises about historical certainty, devotional practice and cultural preservation. How do stories become attached to objects? What evidence can support a traditional identification? How should museums interpret an artifact that remains meaningful to religious communities while also attracting scholarly scrutiny?
These questions extend well beyond Franciscan history. Museums increasingly serve as places where objects are examined through multiple frameworks, including faith, scholarship, conservation and public memory. The St. Francis Missal offers a particularly concentrated example of that process.
The presentation also demonstrates why preserving fragile works is an intellectual responsibility as well as a technical one. An object that cannot survive repeated display risks becoming inaccessible. An object displayed without sufficient care risks losing the very material evidence that makes it valuable.
By bringing the missal together with related artworks and documenting its conservation, the Walters places those concerns within a broader account of Francis’s artistic legacy.
Divine Inspiration: The Legacy of the St. Francis Missal offers more than a glimpse of a rare manuscript. It examines how history, devotion and artistic memory intersect. The book’s precise connection to Francis remains a matter of interpretation, but its capacity to illuminate centuries of religious and cultural history is unmistakable.
