The Basilica of St Francis

The Paintings in the Nave

Along the nave’s walls a series of metal structures brings to mind the baroque altars which, built after the fire of 1655, housed the paintings commissioned by the leading families of Siena. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Sienese architect Giuseppe Partini restored the church bringing it back to its original gothic appearance and destroying the altars. The seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings, which no longer met the taste of the time, had already been moved before this restoration to the Galleria di Belle Arti and, later, to the deposits of the Superintendency, where they remained until 1996, when some of them were replaced in the church. These paintings were made during the Catholic Reformation, when the Church recommended, with greater energy than in the past, the presence of images of saints in places of worship, to counteract the Protestant Reformation’s criticism of their adoration.