Week Forty-Two: St. Francis Preaches to the Birds by Jose Francisco Borges

October 20, 2019

Week Forty-Two: St. Francis Preaches to the Birds by Jose Francisco Borges

For this week's featured image of St. Francis of Assisi from the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, we travel south of the equator to the Northeast Region of Brazil, where Folk Artist Jose Francisco Borges presides over a family dynasty of woodblock printmakers, who learned their trade creating illustrations for cheaply published pamplets of stories and poems known as iteratura de cordel (string literature), because they are often sold at street markets and town festivals hung from washlines. Borges offers us a local variation on the much-loved theme of Francis preaching to the birds. Northeast Brazil is a semi-arid, draught-plagued land of cacti, thorn bush, and scrub known as the sertao (backcountry), famed for its cowboys and cattle ranches, and Borges includes one such prickly plant in his print of the saint from Assisi with the feathered faithful, one of three Franciscan portraits to be found on the Brazilian Cordel Woodcuts page in the Schools of Sacred Art section (John Kohan)