Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality today, continuing to talk about St. Francis and his brothers as God's artists, a theme which we'll just lightly touch on today. There Francis sent out his minstrels, i.e. his friars, into the world to sing a new song of love announcing everlasting happiness, a song of the love of God made man in Jesus Christ who died for us on the cross. And the love of the Virgin Mother, Our Lady, maternally and eternally joyful to have us as her children, believe it or not.
And Francis' sons made their mystical songs heard at the dawn of Franciscanism, for example. There's Blessed Thomas of Celano, Francis' biographer. There's Julian of Speyer, another biographer. St. Bonaventure, the same. Blessed Ugo Panziera, another Franciscan theologian and poet. Giacomino of Verona, Franciscan poet. Blessed Raymond Lull, Dante, famous third-order poet. And the poetic vein didn't extinguish in the following centuries, it sprang up again alive and spontaneous in St. Charles of Sezze, for example.
Among the most genial and universal of these Franciscan poets is Jacopone da Todi who brought the praises of God to the highest forms of expression, and also St. Bernardine of Siena who loved to speak beautifully, as he said, because he said, in preaching to speak beautifully delights the sensitive ear as well as delighting both soul and the body. 
Bernardine was a tender and a very human saint who in his preaching, even though he adopted a pattern of preaching like you'd teach something at school, he introduced to it the gifted and irresistible inventions of an artist.
Painting with Cimabue began the decisive reaction against the Byzantine style, which could be described as cold, abstract, static. With Giotto, another painter whom Vasari calls the disciple of nature and not of others, with Giotto painting took soul and spirituality and brought man back to the sublime simplicity of natural beauties. Art began to enter more into life with the Franciscans. The Christian life conceived as the effort to imitate Christ on the heels of our seraphic saint inspired art to become itself an effort to reproduce Christ, just as Francis had made his whole life an effort to reproduce Jesus.
The life of Christ and the evangelical scenes, the life of St. Francis and the Franciscan scenes, they're all subjects that are loved and preferred by those artists, Cimabue, Giotto, Lorenzetti, Gentile da Fabriano, Nello Bonfigli, Niccolò Alunno of Foligno, Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Giovanni Bellini, among others. 
Also the Della Robbia family will do the same with terracotta and in the mosaics in the Baptistry in Florence in Italy, where the Franciscan Fra Giacomo worked as well. In the apses of St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major, where the Franciscan Fra Giacomo of Camerino worked alongside the Master Torriti, as well as the famous stained glass, which some friars worked out in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, and also in St. Francis of Ferrara Basilica, another basilica in Venice.
Sculpture and architecture as well became more refined, more noble, more slender after the Franciscan and during the Franciscan period. The basilica began to be made in the form of the tau, the tau being so dear to St. Francis and so similar to the Franciscan habit, actually. That style of basilica appears to express the interior crucifixion of the soul spiritually. 
And on the Gothic pinnacles, Christ triumphant, the universal king, becomes submerged in the blue of the sky like a hymn of conquest and of victory.
And in music, in which on the example of St. Francis, the English friar Roger Bacon reigned a sovereign power over every other science because of its capacity of exciting people to a level of devotion that one aims at. That's why music is so powerful. Music also had a revival and it reanimated the churches and the sacred ceremonies, too. 
Even Franciscans contributed to this rebirth, including Fr. Stanislao Soporta, a conventual friar, composer, contemporary of Palestrina, and Fr. Luigi Antonio Sabbatini, Giovanni Battista Martini, and Stanislao Mattei, all conventual friars and Italian composers in the 18th and the 19th centuries.
With all that said, one famous scholar defined St. Francis as the father of the Italian Renaissance and he might be right in saying that. Francis' conception of life, his own life, and his spirituality contain in seed form and express an artistic conception in which the center and foundation, the ideal and model is Christ himself, infinite beauty who draws all men to himself.
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to appreciate what's beautiful in life and what's beautiful in art with the eyes of someone who sees Jesus himself as the supreme beauty and as the true masterpiece of everything that God has made.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.