View in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi

Painted in 1876 on panel and held at the Clark Art Institute, this view inside the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi documents Carolus-Duran's engagement with the Italian medieval architectural heritage during his Roman years and subsequent Italian travels. The Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi is one of the most significant monuments of Italian Gothic architecture and fresco painting, its upper and lower churches decorated by Cimabue, Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini, making it a pilgrimage site for any French painter interested in the origins of the Western pictorial tradition. Carolus-Duran, primarily known as a portraitist and figure painter, here demonstrated an interest in architectural space and sacred atmosphere that his portrait practice rarely required. The Lower Church's particular quality — lower, darker, and more mystically intimate than the Upper Church — would have offered the painter an interior light challenge quite different from his studio or outdoor work. The Clark's acquisition reflects the institution's interest in documentation of the nineteenth-century encounter with Italian art.

The panel support creates a harder, smoother working surface than canvas, appropriate for the careful rendering of architectural detail and stone surfaces. Interior church light — filtered, indirect, colored by frescoes and small windows — demanded careful observation of the relationship between warm fresco colors and the cooler stones of the vaulting and walls. Carolus-Duran's handling would have needed to capture spatial recession through tonal gradation in the restricted light environment.