Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We began talking the last time about art in our series on Franciscan spirituality, and St. Francis himself certainly is an artist of the interior life. 
If you know anything about St. Francis, you know that he didn't have PhDs, he wasn't a philosopher, but he was an artist. He was an artist in his conception of life, artist of the supernatural, which he translated into works. Francis lived in a higher sphere of knowledge with an intuitive, immediate rationality that grasped reality in its central nucleus. He had such a richness and efficiency to his personality, and he was able to grasp instantly the intrinsic rationality of things. It was all wrapped in an irradiation of light, a light which is knowledge and which is love. Francis felt, as very few people do, the profundity and the attractiveness of the mystery of life which surrounded him. 
St. Francis wasn't an aesthete, an idealist, or formalist, but he was an artist of the highest, most mystical, supernatural reality. He was an artist that, inside of himself, lived, tasted, and experienced reality and transformed it into a singular, most original work of art, which was his very life. 
He didn't lack the use of his will in making his work, his work of art, rather, interiorly he pined away, he was consumed, signifying what Dante said in Purgatory: "I am one who, when love breeds in me, takes note, and when he, what he within dictates, I, in that way without, would speak and shape," says Dante.
In his book on Franciscan spirituality, Father Ciccarelli says that we have to understand, though, that Francis wasn't a religious artist, or a religious who's also an artist, his masterpiece is his interior life. His life lived from his conversion with an ardor, with a fullness, with an adhesion to an ideal, with a newness and a harmony incomparable to others. His masterpiece is himself as God's work of sacred art. 
The sacred is his point of departure, which is the intuitive, supernatural, mystical intuitions that he had. The sacred is also the principal animator of the work, meaning, in this case, the seraphic love which made him embrace a sentiment of supernatural sympathy towards all creatures. 
The sacred is also his point of arrival. It's Christ crucified, his perfect ideal, passionately loved above all other things. This idea was fixed in his mind and in his heart to the point of being converted into a motive for powerful creation, which we could call artistic, but in a more profound and in a higher and more complete sense than what normally happens in the Christian life.
The holy man of Assisi lives and expresses his ideal as very few have ever done, because very few, even among the saints, have lived the Christian life and grasped the beauty and harmony and showing and demonstrating it to others as Francis did. 
Friar Francis began his work of art throwing himself into the arms of the bishop of Assisi after casting aside his father's clothes. We can call that the moment of his engagement to Lady Poverty. He began to realize his ideal when he kissed the leper and when he made the resolution at the Porziuncola to go about the world preaching the gospel, just as the apostles had done. 
He defended his ideal before the pontifical court, sharing his singular and penetrating parable of the beautiful poor woman found in the forest, loved by the king, who sent his sons to the court of their father, the king, where they were welcomed and nourished. 
Francis pined away for his ideal when he wept in the field, because love is not loved, as he would say. He would say that about God. Love with a capital L is not loved by us, and that would make him weep.
Francis defended his ideal when he shared with Friar Leo the story of perfect joy. When with Friar Rufino he preached about renouncing himself. When with Friar Masseo, consumed with joy next to a clear stream and on a beautiful rock, he shared the little pieces of bread which divine providence had offered him. 
St. Francis was the artist that told everyone his ideal, to men, to women, to birds, to beasts, to God, to all his creatures. He invited everyone to love his idea when he put together the crèche scene at Greccio on Christmas night and when he yearned for love in front of the Blessed Sacrament. He realized his ideal fully on Mount La Verna when he received the stigmata and became the living image of Christ crucified.  
This melding together of Francis with his ideal, this transfiguration, is also an art, an art in the highest sense, because it's a personal reliving of the Christian reality and presenting it revested with concreteness and charm. It became a powerful instrument of attraction, meaning an instrument for the apostolate. If all the world was going after him, as we read in the Little Flowers, if he provoked a current of sympathy in all men of every race, tongue, condition, it's at least in part because of the charm of his conception of life and of nature, simple and profound, yes, we could say, even artistic.
Poverty which is normally condemned and shunned by people is loved by him, and so it comes out transfigured and turns into an unknown richness, true good called Lady Poverty, as he called her. Dante called poverty a wealth unknown, a good that is so fruitful that many run after it in imitation of Francis. His way of abnegation and making oneself even contemptible in the eyes of others, and after Francis lived in such simplicity of life, it became a desired goal to live that way for well-educated men and women, princes, even kings too. 
Suffering is presented by him even as a source of joy, perfect joy. Heroic chastity, thanks to Francis, becomes attractive to knights and to ladies. And religious life becomes a noble training field for his knights of the round table, as he would call his religious brothers. 
Even death itself lost its gloomy aspect and was transformed into a sister which opens up paradise to us, sorella morte, as he would call his sister death. All the creatures from which Francis drew his inspiration and to which he approaches, as Dante says, with clear eye and pure affection, they all lose their power of danger and peril, and once again they become a ladder by which we can climb up to God.
The life of St. Francis is a life of the knight that celebrates his lore, that speaks when his experience becomes a suffering reality, and that recounts and recreates that which he learned through suffering. 
In short, his whole life becomes a poetic imitation of the life of his Savior and of our Savior. 
So let's ask Our Lady for the grace to share in some of St. Francis' artistic madness. Madness to the world, but not to Jesus and Mary and to their true sons and daughters.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.