Sordid mysticism, decadent poverty: On two episodes of Franciscan aesthetics in Italy’s modernism (Savinio 1946; D’Annunzio 1926)

Fascism cultivated the myth of Saint Francis as an icon of nationalism, heroism and Italianness. Such a myth was informed by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s earlier uses of Francis as a model for his own art and life. After the Second World War, Francis was reclaimed by anti-fascist intellectuals such as Alberto Savinio, who worked on a pacifist film about the Saint’s life that was never completed. In this article, I examine two understudied episodes of D’Annunzio’s and Savinio’s supposedly opposed receptions of Saint Francis, showing that they actually converge on a shared rejection of euphemistic, palatable and ultimately bourgeois images of sainthood. I discuss, in particular, an ekphrastic article in which Savinio, in 1946, explains the Franciscan aesthetics of ‘sordid’ sainthood through Leonor Fini’s sensual paintings. I then show how D’Annunzio constructed a similar visual Franciscanism in the cell of pure dreams, his death chamber in the mansion/monument of the Vittoriale degli Italiani. This room, advertised in Vanity Fair in 1926, uses colours, inscriptions and a painting of D’Annunzio and Saint Francis by Guido Cadorin to establish a paradoxically decadent (and, indeed, ‘sordid’) aesthetics of Franciscan mystic poverty.