Approval of the Rules of the Franciscan Order by Pope Innocent III in 1209

Livio Agresti · n.d.

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with lead white gouache, over incising and black chalk, on cream laid paper

Original size

Sight: 28.8 × 20.3 cm (11 3/8 × 8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This compositionally rich drawing captures one of the most consequential moments in medieval religious history — the papal sanction that gave the Franciscan movement its institutional foundation. Livio Agresti was a Mannerist painter from Forlì who spent much of his career in Rome, contributing to major decorative cycles in the Vatican and the Oratorio del Gonfalone. This work reveals the sophistication of his preparatory process: layers of incised guidelines and black chalk underpin the confident pen work, while brown wash builds volume and lead white gouache lifts highlights from the gathered figures with precision. The result reads less like a sketch and more like a finished composition in miniature. The scene commemorates the moment in 1209 when Pope Innocent III granted verbal approval to Francis of Assisi's early Rule — an act that transformed a small band of itinerant preachers into one of the most influential religious orders in history. That approval was informal rather than a formal papal bull, and it would be another fourteen years before Honorius III put the definitive Rule in writing. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Agresti's intricate draughtsmanship into the warmth and depth of oil on canvas, preserving the ceremony and gravity of the original while giving it the presence of a fully realised work.