Francis in the Sky

“A meta-narrative about the future of the human race as it was understood in the early modern world of the Americas,” is how Jaime Lara introduces on page one the main topic of Birdman of Assisi: Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes and Lara concludes his book, “My intention first and foremost has been to write a work of art history” (256). Between the covers Lara has accomplished both objectives; but Birdman is far more. Lara reveals how St. Francis becomes the Birdman of Assisi in fascinating detail along with more than two hundred gorgeous color plates and photographs of etchings, woodblock prints, mosaics,murals, oil paintings and finally Andean processional winged sculptures. The life of St. Francis (né Giovanni Francesco de Bernardone c. 1181-1226) was one of contradictions: luxury/poverty, insouciance/troubled self-examination, solitude/outgoing charity, hedonism/Christian devotion, gentleness/strictness and above all mystic influence. Francis envisioned living as Jesus did —an itinerant life dependent on the good will of strangers as he wandered his world, and even the Saracen world, bringing Christ’s message to all he met.