San Francesco, Assisi - Lower Church

Chapel of San Giovanni Battista (St. John the Baptist)

  As with the chapel to saint Nicholas in the North Transept, the chapel of John the Baptist was paid for by cardinal Napoleone Orsini Frangipane, in this case with the intention of providing his own place of burial. For various reasons, it did not quite work out. The regular Ghibelline/Guelph quarrel boiled over, with the result that a rather nasty character called Muzio Brancaleoni, a Ghibelline, helped himself to the money that had been set aside for the chapel, as well as the contents of the treasury. Pope John XXII excommunicated him, of course, but that never seemed to worry the Ghibellines. Napoleone may not have made it anyway - he died in Avignon, and possibly ended up in St. Peter's in Rome. So the tomb is empty. The bronze panel above the altar was installed in 1926, and the chapel became the home of a sacred relic, the veil of the Virgin. 

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