Giotto and the Three Stigmatas of Saint Francis of Assisi

October brings the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, one of Italy’s most popular saints. Today, we associate Saint Francis with humility and self-imposed poverty, a love for animals, the origins of the Franciscan order, and his monumental basilica in Assisi. But during Francis’s lifetime and for many decades afterward, people mostly knew Saint Francis for his stigmata — a miraculous event in which Francis, after a period of intense prayer, was marked with the physical wounds of t