St Francis Preaching before Honorius III	Giotto	1297-1300
Fresco	270 x 230	Basilique

St Francis preaching before Honorius III is one of the scenes in which gesture, attitude and facial expression are essential for the story, and in this respect it was to become a model for fourteenth-century painters. Although some have felt St Francis' gesture to be vulgar, it certainly was not considered coarse in Giotto's day - that lively way of indicating with the thumb was to reappear in such paintings as Pietro Lorenzetti's Virgin with St Francis and St John in the Lower Church of San Francesco. The prelates' gestures of meditation and wonder were to become extremely common in the course of the fourteenth century, but here they were total innovations.