Maestro di San Pietro in Villore

A name, a place and a necessary correction

Few conventional names in the historiography of early Italian painting invite geographical misunderstanding as readily as that of the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore. To readers who know Tuscany, the toponym “Villore” suggests at once the hilly hamlet north-east of Vicchio in the Mugello. That landscape is tied to the birthplaces of Giotto and Fra Angelico, and so to the great Florentine tradition of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Under such a name one would naturally expect a minor Giottesque master of the Trecento, whose eponymous panel might hang in the Museo di Arte Sacra e Religiosità Popolare “Beato Angelico” at Vicchio. None of this is correct. The church that gives the master his name is not in the Mugello at all. The painter it designates belongs not to the age of Giotto but to the closing decades of the twelfth century, more than a hundred years earlier, and to the southern Tuscan countryside between the Crete Senesi and the Val d’Orcia.

The distinction matters, because the confusion is more than a matter of map-reading. The Mugello hamlet of Villore exists and has an old parish church, but that church is dedicated to San Lorenzo. The church was rebuilt in the seventeenth century, except for its tower-like campanile. Its known movable contents were eighteenth-century canvases; three were stolen in November 1996, and one of them, a Madonna del Rosario, was recovered and is now shown in the pieve of San Giovanni Battista at Vicchio. The sources consulted record no church of San Pietro at that Villore, and no medieval painting by an anonymous “Master of Villore” has ever been linked to it. The church that concerns us, San Pietro in Villore, stands instead just outside the medieval borgo of San Giovanni d’Asso. The borgo was once an autonomous comune and is now part of the municipality of Montalcino, in the province of Siena and the diocese of Montepulciano-Chiusi-Pienza.

Nor is the master a painter of the Trecento, as the toponym might suggest, or a Florentine. The work that gives him his name and the only other work convincingly given to the same hand are both monumental painted crosses of the Christus triumphans type. In such crosses the crucified Christ is shown alive, with open eyes and a frontal, upright body, free of the suffering that would dominate the iconography of the following century. The most recent and thorough study dates both to the last quarter of the twelfth century. The Maestro di San Pietro in Villore is thus one of the very few identifiable personalities of Romanesque panel painting in Tuscany south of Florence. Since the painter of the Sant’Antimo cross is held to be the same man, he is the author of what are commonly described as the two oldest surviving panel paintings in the territory of Siena.

A last preliminary point concerns the name itself. It is not an old connoisseur’s label that has gathered a body of works over decades, like so many “Masters of” coined in the first half of the twentieth century. Gabriele Fattorini, then director of the diocesan museum at Pienza, introduced it explicitly in 2018. He did so in his historical and artistic entry on the cross in the catalogue of the eighteenth edition of the Restituzioni restoration programme. Fattorini wrote that both crosses must belong to a single painter, “o al limite maestranza”, whom he had “chosen to baptise” the Maestro di San Pietro in Vìllore. The name is therefore very recent and its corpus minimal. Its definition rests on one carefully argued catalogue entry, which in turn builds on observations first made in the 1920s.

San Pietro in Villore: the church, its name and its territory

The church of San Pietro in Villore stands on a grassy terrace just beyond the old nucleus of San Giovanni d’Asso, north-east of the castle that dominates the village, at the edge of the modern settlement. Its odd title has long puzzled visitors. The interpretation repeated in the 2018 catalogue and in local historical literature holds that “Villore” is a vernacular corruption of “Vincoli”. The church would then originally have been dedicated to San Pietro in Vincoli, Saint Peter in Chains. Indeed, one photograph of the cross in the Fondazione Zeri photographic archive in Bologna is captioned “San Giovanni d’Asso, S. Pietro in Vincoli”. The etymology is plausible and widely accepted, but the sources present it as an interpretation rather than a documented fact, and it should be treated as such.

The site is old. The church appears in the records of the long-running jurisdictional dispute between the dioceses of Siena and Arezzo over a group of rural pievi, which begins in 714. There it figures as a canonica subject to a pieve at Pava. On one detail the sources disagree, and it should be checked: the 2018 catalogue entry names the pieve of San Pietro in Pava, while other summaries, for example the one on Wikipedia, name the pieve of Santa Maria a Pava. Further mentions are reported in ninth-century Aretine documents, and the church appears in the papal tithe lists of 1278–79. What matters here is that the present building is not the early medieval canonica but a twelfth-century Romanesque reconstruction.

That reconstruction has been plausibly tied to a precise political moment. The present building is thought to have been begun after Count Paltonieri di Forteguerra, lord of San Giovanni d’Asso, submitted to the Commune of Siena in 1151, and to have been finished by the end of the century. In the reasoning of the most recent study, 1151 therefore serves as a probable terminus post quem for the new church and, by extension, for any furnishings made for it.

The church has a single nave of two rib-vaulted bays, separated by a round arch on carved brackets and closed by a semicircular apse that is narrower and lower than the nave. Beneath the presbytery lies a crypt, set across the main axis and divided by columns into small aisles. It is believed to be contemporary with the rest of the building, and construction may have started there. The gabled façade is built of squared sandstone and alberese below and of brick above; the upper part was rebuilt after damage usually placed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Four blind arches on half-columns with carved capitals flank a splayed portal with geometric interlace. Scholars of Tuscan Romanesque have linked the building’s sculptural and architectural vocabulary, broadly Lombard in derivation, to the nearby abbey church of Sant’Antimo. That link will matter when we turn to the master’s second work.

The church’s later history is one of slow decline followed by antiquarian rediscovery. After the pieve of San Giovanni Battista was built inside the village in the fourteenth century, San Pietro lost importance. According to the local parish account it remained the parish church only until 1492, and it suffered a fire in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century the Sienese Pannilini family acquired the castle of San Giovanni d’Asso and other properties. On these they founded a priory in 1591, which included the patronage of the pieve of San Giovanni Battista and of San Pietro in Villore. The parish history adds that from 1711 the patronage alternated between the Pannilini and the Gori Pannilini families, and that it was still exercised in the early twentieth century. Early in that century the local pievano had the church restored, and the brick bell-gable dates from that campaign. A copy of the painted cross now hangs in the apse.

To forestall a confusion common in popular literature, it should be recalled that San Pietro in Villore also housed a second celebrated medieval painting of quite different date and character. This is a triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Peter and Paul, with the blessing Redeemer and two saints in the gables, by the Ducciesque painter Ugolino di Nerio. The Uffizi dates it to about 1325–30 and sees in it the collaboration of the young Bartolomeo Bulgarini. According to the Uffizi, the Gori-Pannilini family, patrons of the parish, sold the triptych to the Contini Bonacossi family in 1938. It passed to the Italian state with the Contini Bonacossi donation and now hangs in the Uffizi. In the 1930s a Sienese art historian assigned this triptych to a separate anonymous personality, the “Maestro del trittico della Pieve di San Giovanni d’Asso”. That name refers only to the fourteenth-century triptych and has nothing to do with the twelfth-century painter of the cross, though the similar place-names make confusion easy.

The eponymous cross: documentary history from 1813 to 2018

For a twelfth-century panel, the history of the San Pietro in Villore cross can be reconstructed with unusual precision, thanks largely to the archival research published in 2018. Its original destination is not documented. Fattorini argued that the cross looks like a “perfect appendix” to the church’s architecture. It may therefore have belonged to the original furnishings and been painted in the last quarter of the twelfth century, as the rebuilding was completed. But he explicitly called this a supposition held “without definitive certainty”, and that qualification should be kept in any discussion. The cross’s presence at San Pietro in Villore is documented from the early nineteenth century onwards; the assumption that it was made for that church is a reasonable hypothesis, not a fact.

Painted Cross (Christus triumphans), Pienza

The first known mention dates from 21–22 April 1813. A Sienese antiquarian, Ettore Romagnoli, recording his “little journeys” through the Sienese countryside in manuscript descriptions of monuments, visited San Pietro in Villore. In the “sotterraneo”, the crypt, he noted a crucifix “assai maltrattato dal tempo”, which he called “pittura spaventevole e d’una rarissima antichità, e degno d’un gabinetto”: a frightful painting of the rarest antiquity, worthy of a collector’s cabinet.

In June 1862 the cross was seen again in the crypt, then called the “antica confessione”, by the compiler of the general inventory of works of art in the province of Siena, which was published only in 1897. He dated it to the thirteenth century and stressed its terrible condition, calling it a panel “che può dirsi intieramente perduta per le innumerevoli scrostature”, one that could be said to be entirely lost through countless flakings. The 2018 study observed that both these early references had escaped earlier scholarship.

The same study brought to light another episode: the cross’s appearance at the great exhibition of early Sienese art held in Siena in 1904. It was shown there as a thirteenth-century work, lent by the “fratelli Pannilini” of San Giovanni d’Asso, as catalogue number 2502. The physical evidence of that loan survives on the back of the panel: the exhibition label, recording provenance and catalogue number, and two wax seals bearing the Pannilini arms.

The real critical rediscovery came in 1926, preceded by a brief mention by a Dutch historian of Italian painting in 1923. In 1926 Federico Mason Perkins, the American connoisseur of Sienese painting who lived in Tuscany, published “Un Crocefisso inedito senese” in the Rassegna d’arte senese. Perkins recognised the panel as “uno dei cimelii più preziosi della vecchia pittura senese”, one of the most precious relics of early Sienese painting. Crucially, he compared it with the equally damaged cross from the abbey of Sant’Antimo. That cross had struck him shortly before at an exhibition in Montalcino, and he had discussed it in the same journal in 1925. As Fattorini emphasised, all later scholarship on the relationship between the two crosses derives from Perkins.

The cross’s later material history is one of repeated attempts to halt its decay. It was restored in 1955. At that time a leading Sienese art historian published it in a catalogue of paintings from the Sienese contado and the Maremma under the telling heading “la più antica pittura senese?”, the oldest Sienese painting, with a question mark that the 2018 study judged entirely legitimate. Another intervention followed in the 1980s. For several decades the cross was deposited in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena. It was then destined for the diocesan museum at Pienza in the Palazzo Borgia, on the authority of a 1998 guide to that museum by Laura Martini, which is the source cited; the exact date of the move is not given. It hangs in the first room among the collection’s oldest works. Some online sources and catalogue records still give the Pinacoteca Nazionale as its location; this reflects the earlier phase and is out of date.

The latest and by far the most thorough campaign of study and conservation took place in 2017–18, in the eighteenth edition of the Restituzioni programme sponsored by Intesa Sanpaolo. A team of conservators carried out the restoration under the direction of the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the provinces of Siena, Grosseto and Arezzo. It was accompanied by non-invasive analyses and analyses of micro-samples, coordinated by the University of Bergamo with the University of Urbino and the CNR Institute of Geosciences in Florence. After restoration the cross was shown in the Restituzioni exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria Reale near Turin, which closed on 16 September 2018. Its return to Pienza was marked by a public presentation on 4 October 2018, after which it was reinstalled in the first room of the museum.

The 2018 campaign transformed knowledge of the cross as a physical object. Its findings deserve close attention, because, as the scientific report itself stressed, technical studies of twelfth-century Italian panel paintings are extremely few. The cross is painted in tempera and gold on oak. Earlier literature thought the wood was chestnut; the identification of oak is one of the results of the recent investigation.

The catalogue datasheet gives maximum dimensions of 177 × 116.5 × 12 cm, including the thickness of the nimbus reconstructed during restoration. The Fondazione Zeri record, which predates the restoration, gives 177 × 118 cm. The two figures are compatible: the difference in width reflects the eroded and reintegrated ends of the crossbar. The restoration report itself contains an evident typographical error in its overall dimensions (“176,5 × 17,5 cm”), so the datasheet figure should be preferred.

The conservators’ report describes the construction in detail. The support consists of five oak elements about 5 cm thick, plus a poplar nimbus shaped like a segment of an orange. The upright, which carries the load, is a board 176.6 cm high and 43.3 cm wide. Two strips 8.5 cm wide were added to its sides to bring the central field to 60 cm; they are butted flat against the board and anchored by four glued oak dowels. The crossbar is a single board of about 118 × 21 cm, set at right angles to the upright and joined to it from the back with a half-lap joint. The joint is secured with glue, with seven oak dowels 2 cm in diameter that pass through the whole thickness, and with ten nails driven from the back and clinched under the ground. At the top, a further element 60 cm long and 21.8 cm high, with horizontal grain, is fixed to the front of the upright with a dovetail joint. The lower end ends in an unpainted tenon with what seem to be three large peg holes, into which an additional base or foot must once have been fitted.

The preparation of the painted surface anticipates practices later codified in workshop literature. Strips of parchment were glued across joints and cracks to absorb the movement of the wood. A mestica was spread directly on the wood and, before it dried, a canvas lining of three pieces of cloth of differing weave was laid over it and turned around the edges, which were also painted. The canvas was then covered with two layers of gesso and glue: a coarser, whitish inner layer about 180–200 microns thick and a finer, yellowish outer one. The scientific report cautiously compared this two-stage preparation with the distinction between gesso grosso and gesso sottile described in Cennino Cennini’s treatise more than two centuries later. On this ground the edges of the areas to be gilded were incised with a silver stylus.

The analyses revealed a refined palette. The only blue is finely ground lapis lazuli, mixed with lead white and laid without an azurite underlayer; in the more intense blues, such as the Virgin’s mantle, coarser particles give a darker tone. Green earth is the only green identified; no copper-based pigments and no indigo were found. The yellows are lead-tin yellow and an arsenic-based pigment, presumably orpiment, always in mixtures. The reds are vermilion, often glazed with madder lake to soften its brilliance. A different red lake, of insect origin, was used for the pink dress of the saint at the far right, so the painter worked with two distinct lakes in a deliberate play of colour. The gold leaf contains marked silver impurities and lies over a thin base of brown earth.

The flesh tones are built from lead white and ochres, reddened with vermilion on cheeks and lips. Lead-tin yellow was added to the body of Christ, apparently to keep its tone more livid. The shadows are laid in liquid green earth and reinforced with fine dark-brown, red and black lines, and the highlights are applied in lead white with a fine brush.

Infrared reflectography showed no underdrawing beyond the incisions separating the figures from the gilded fields, though the scientists cautioned that a drawing might exist in a material transparent to infrared. Two technical observations stand out. During cleaning, microscopic fragments of gold leaf with yellow and black brushstrokes were found on the chalice held by the woman in the left side panel; these allowed the restorers to recover the vessel’s decoration as recorded in a photograph published in 1955. And several areas now white, such as the Virgin’s dress and part of Saint John’s mantle, may originally have had yellow orpiment finishes that are now lost.

Even after restoration the cross remains badly damaged. Heavy insect attack destroyed the upper half of the nimbus, the sides of the central field, the ends of the crossbar and the edges of the top panel. A large knot in the lower part of the upright crumbled and left a cavity. At the crossing, the wood’s natural shrinkage, restrained by the dowels, opened deep splits along Christ’s body. One of these tore the canvas and shifted the paint layer on the left arm by about 4 cm, affecting the face of the figure identified as the Magdalene.

The restorers took a strictly conservative approach. They used balsa wood to fill and protect losses and to rebuild the missing part of the nimbus, whose circumference could be worked out from the surviving portion. Pictorial reintegration was confined to watercolour selezione cromatica within islands of loss, to balance the better-preserved right side with the more damaged left. Anyone comparing photographs taken before the restoration with the panel as it looks now should remember that the nimbus now visible is largely a modern reconstruction.

Iconography: the triumphant Christ and the woman with the chalice

The standard illustrated index of Italian Romanesque panel painting, published in 1949, lists the cross as the work of a Sienese master of the second half of the twelfth century, in the category of “Crucifixes with Crucifixion figures in the side fields”. At the centre is Christ alive and triumphant, his head framed by a thick nimbus.

Above the nimbus the titulus, in white letters on red, reads

[IESV]S NASARENVS / REX IVDEORV[M].

In the top panel two half-length flying angels hold a clipeus containing the half-length Redeemer, who blesses with his right hand and holds a book with a rich gold cover in his left. Sandberg-Vavalà, among others, read this image as a symbolic Ascension. Further half-length young angels appear at the ends of the crossbar.

Little remains of Christ’s rigid, frontal legs. The flat, splayed feet rest on a suppedaneum set off from the blue ground of the cross, which the painter gave the unusual form of an irregular hexagon rather than the usual square. Below the left foot one seems to see the silhouette of a kneeling supplicant, but it is so worn that it cannot safely be identified as a donor. It may rather be a fragment of a more crowded scene in the base, as on many other crosses.

The side panels hold four standing figures, two on each side. On this cross they overlap the painted frames, whereas on the Sant’Antimo cross the mourners stand within them. All four bear a small cross on the forehead. The iconographic interest of the work centres on the figure in the place of honour at Christ’s right, on the viewer’s left. A veiled woman in white raises her hands, covered with a precious cloth as was done for the most venerated relics, to hold a chalice in which she gathers the blood from the tiny wound in Christ’s side. The image is closer to the allegory of Ecclesia than to the Virgin, and the figure was long read that way; yet here she would appear alone, without her usual counterpart, Synagogue.

Sandberg-Vavalà had already noted a similar rarity in the later Umbrian cross known as the cross of Porziano, there with the blood gathered in an ampulla rather than a chalice. That cross was formerly in the Treasury Museum and now stands at the centre of the Lower Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. She supposed that both derived from a common model, perhaps a transalpine miniature in which the allegory of Ecclesia had already been transformed.

The decisive step in reading the side panels came in 2018. The four figures of the Porziano cross happen to carry inscriptions. These identify the woman gathering the blood as Mary of James (also called Mary of Cleophas), the woman behind her as the Magdalene, and the figures opposite as Saint John the Evangelist and the Virgin. Fattorini proposed that the same holy persons must appear at Pienza, though he noted that their arrangement differs. On the right, the young man is certainly John, and the woman behind him, in her red mantle, must be the Magdalene. On the left, the blue mantle suits the Virgin, so the woman in front of her gathering the blood would have to be Mary of James.

The identification is supported by the older cross of the abbey of Rosano near Florence, where Mary of James appears at the right end of the crossbar with an ampulla, alluding to the gathering of Christ’s blood. This is now the most authoritative reading. It is nevertheless an inference by analogy, since the Pienza cross carries no identifying inscriptions, and it should be presented as such. Fattorini explicitly left open, as a field for future research, the links between the cult of relics of the Holy Blood, the Eucharistic theme, the iconography of Ecclesia and this type of cross.

The second work: the Sant’Antimo cross and the constitution of the corpus

The Maestro di San Pietro in Villore exists as an artistic personality only because the eponymous cross is not isolated. Its companion is the painted cross from the Benedictine¹ abbey of Sant’Antimo in the Val di Starcia, near Castelnuovo dell’Abate, now in the Museo Civico e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra at Montalcino (the so-called Musei riuniti), housed in the former convent of Sant’Agostino. The two places lie some 18 kilometres (about 11 miles) apart as the crow flies.

The Sant’Antimo cross is in poor condition, though less uniformly so than the Pienza panel. The top panel survives, worn along its edges, with a blessing Redeemer in a clipeus between two half-length angels. Christ’s figure and the right side panel, with Saint John, are comparatively well preserved. The left side panel, which by convention would have held the Virgin, has lost almost all its paint, and the lower shaft is reduced to bare wood. The 2018 study also documents the cross’s early history. The same Sienese antiquarian who saw the Villore cross in 1813 saw in the abbey sacristy, on 18 May 1818, a “crocefisso in tavola sul fare di quello di Giunta Pisano”, a panel crucifix in the manner of Giunta Pisano, and Fattorini identified it with the Montalcino cross. It should not be confused with the carved and polychromed wooden crucifix above the high altar of the abbey church, which is a distinct work.

The 2018 entry rests the comparison on several precise correspondences. Both crosses arrange the top panel in the same way and show full-length mourners in the side panels: two at Sant’Antimo, painted within the frames, and four at Villore, overlapping them. The figures share the same physiognomies and a markedly graphic style, evident in the strands of Christ’s beard, in the drapery and in the beautiful semi-transparent loincloth. Both use bright, clear colours that at times attempt to model the volume of the garments in chiaroscuro. The two panels also share the same construction technique, though in different woods, poplar at Sant’Antimo and oak at Villore. On this basis Fattorini concluded that everything points to the same painter or, at most, the same workshop or team, and he gave that painter his name.

The epistemic status of this two-work corpus needs to be stated clearly. That the two crosses are closely related is a consensus nearly a century old: “from Perkins onwards”, as Fattorini wrote, studies have always stressed how closely they correspond. Perkins himself, however, did not claim a single hand. In 1926 he wrote that they belonged “at least to the same epoch, as well as to the same artistic school”, that is, to a production “almost certainly” Sienese of the last quarter of the twelfth century. It was Sandberg-Vavalà, in her monumental 1929 study of the Italian painted cross, who first suggested, cautiously, that they might be by the same hand. She also argued that they depended on the current of Umbrian painting whose best-known monument is the 1187 cross in Spoleto Cathedral, signed or inscribed with the name of Alberto Sotio.

The step from “same hand” as a hypothesis to a named anonymous master as a convention is Fattorini’s. He took it in 2018, with the significant reservation that the author might be a maestranza, a team, rather than an individual. The attribution of the Sant’Antimo cross to the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore should therefore be described as a well-founded proposal accepted in the most recent literature, not as a long-established consensus under that name. Some popular and museum summaries still describe the Sant’Antimo cross simply as the work of an anonymous Sienese master of about 1190, without the conventional name.

The sources consulted attribute no third work to the master. The 2018 entry places beside him, as a parallel rather than identical personality, the anonymous painter of the lunette from the church of Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio in Siena, now in the museum of the Contrada dell’Istrice. It treats cross no. 597 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena, the Maestro di Tressa and Margarito d’Arezzo as later developments for which the Villore master’s language is a “symptomatic antecedent”, not as works by his hand. An older Umbrian catalogue record compares a mid-twelfth-century Umbrian cross with Tuscan crosses “such as that of San Giovanni d’Asso”; this is a comparison, not an attribution.

Painted Cross from Sant’Antimo, Montalcino

This painted cross comes from the Benedictine abbey of Sant’Antimo in the Val di Starcia, below Castelnuovo dell’Abate, and is now in the Museo Civico e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra at Montalcino. It is the only work that the specialist literature assigns, alongside the eponymous panel now in Pienza, to the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore. Its kinship with the cross from San Giovanni d’Asso has been recognised since Federico Mason Perkins discussed it in 1925–26. Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, in her 1929 study of the Italian painted cross, cautiously suggested that the two might be by the same hand. In 2018 Gabriele Fattorini concluded that both belong to a single painter, or at most to a single team, and gave that painter his conventional name. The attribution is therefore a recent and well-argued proposal rather than a long-established tradition, and museum literature still often describes the cross simply as the work of an anonymous Sienese master of about 1190. No document fixes its date. The setting in the last quarter of the twelfth century rests on style and on the history of the abbey church, whose building campaigns continued well into the second half of the century.

The cross has the classic structure of the Christus triumphans: a rectangular top panel, a long crossbar with square terminals, broad side panels flanking Christ’s body, and a lower shaft. The whole object survives, but its state of preservation is very uneven. The top panel is worn along its edges. The left side panel has lost almost all its paint, the right one is better preserved, and the lower shaft is reduced to bare, darkened wood in which Christ’s legs and feet can no longer be read. Behind Christ’s arms, the cross proper is painted as a blue band edged in red, set against a ground whose gold is now largely worn away. This chromatic device recurs, with the same function, on the cross from San Pietro in Villore.

The figure of Christ, frontal and upright, is the best-preserved passage of the painting. His head, barely inclined, is set against a gilded nimbus inscribed with a cross whose arms are decorated with small squared motifs that imitate inset gems. The face is long and severe, with large open eyes outlined in dark strokes, a long straight nose and a small mouth. The beard is divided into regular strands and the dark hair falls in narrow locks onto the shoulders. The arms are stretched horizontally along the crossbar and the hands lie open, without any sign of strain. The torso is articulated by a firm graphic pattern: the pectorals, the arch of the ribs and the division of the abdomen are drawn in fine dark lines over a pale carnation and only lightly shaded. The overall impression is of a living Christ, untouched by suffering, who displays rather than endures the Cross.

The loincloth is one of the most distinctive elements of the work. It is a long, light blue-grey cloth that falls almost to the knees, with thin folds that make it look semi-transparent. At the waist it is gathered by a knotted girdle whose ends hang down the front of the body. Fattorini singled out the semi-transparent loincloth, together with the strands of the beard and the linear treatment of the drapery, as one of the shared traits that link this cross to the Pienza panel. The knotted girdle, by contrast, does not appear on the panel from San Pietro in Villore. It is a variant within the same model and a reminder that the two crosses are not replicas of each other.

The top panel contains the half-length Redeemer in a clipeus, between two half-length angels set in rectangular fields. As on the Pienza cross, the scheme can be read as a symbolic Ascension, crowning the image of the Crucified with that of Christ in glory. Fattorini placed the arrangement of the top panel first among the correspondences between the two works. Between the top panel and Christ’s nimbus lies a zone of red bands. It seems to correspond to the area of the titulus, which is no longer legible. On the left terminal of the crossbar a worn half-length figure can be made out, probably an angel, while the right terminal has lost its paint.

The side panels once held two standing mourners, painted within the frames of their fields. On the Pienza cross the four figures overlap the frames instead, and the difference is one of the most evident distinctions between the two works. On the right side panel, the better-preserved figure is a young nimbed saint in a pale tunic with a pinkish mantle. By convention and by comparison with the Pienza cross he can be identified as Saint John the Evangelist. The left side panel, at Christ’s right, would traditionally have held the Virgin. Almost nothing survives there, and her presence is an assumption based on iconographic convention, not something the painting itself shows. The reduction to two mourners, against the four at San Pietro in Villore and the woman with the chalice found there, gives the Sant’Antimo cross a more conventional iconography than its companion.

According to the 2018 study, the two crosses share the same construction technique, carried out in different woods: oak at Pienza and poplar here. They also share the same figure types and the same markedly graphic style, with bright, clear colours sometimes used to model the volume of the garments in chiaroscuro. Sandberg-Vavalà traced this language to the Umbrian painting of the late twelfth century centred on Spoleto, whose best-known monument is the 1187 cross in Spoleto Cathedral, inscribed with the name of “Alberto Sotio”. Whether the master was a local painter of the Sienese countryside trained on Spoletine models, or a painter who came to southern Tuscany from Umbria, remains unresolved. The most recent literature explicitly leaves the question open. The relative order of the two crosses has not been established either, and nothing proves that the Pienza panel precedes the Sant’Antimo one, or the reverse.

The earliest known notice of the cross dates from 18 May 1818. On that day a Sienese antiquarian, describing the monuments of the contado, saw in the sacristy of Sant’Antimo a “crocefisso in tavola sul fare di quello di Giunta Pisano”, a panel crucifix in the manner of Giunta Pisano. Fattorini identified this notice with the present cross. The panel must not be confused with the carved and polychromed wooden crucifix that hangs above the high altar of the abbey church, which is a distinct work. Today the Sant’Antimo cross is valued above all as a document. Damaged as it is, it is one of the two surviving panels that allow the scholar to reconstruct the personality of a painter active in southern Tuscany at the end of the twelfth century, at the origins of the region’s painting.

Critical fortune: from Sienese relic to named anonymous

The master’s critical history falls into three stages. The first, from 1813 to 1904, is one of antiquarian notice without art-historical framing. The cross was seen as a venerable and frightful relic of “the rarest antiquity”, dated loosely to the thirteenth century and treated as all but lost.

The second stage opens with Perkins in 1925–26, when the cross entered the canon of Sienese painting as one of the most precious relics of its origins, paired with the Sant’Antimo cross and assigned to a late-twelfth-century Sienese school. Sandberg-Vavalà’s study of 1929 gave this pairing an iconographic and stylistic framework: a common hand, an Umbrian and Spoletine source, and the rare motif of the woman with the chalice. In 1949 the cross entered the standard index of Romanesque panel painting as the work of a Sienese master of the second half of the twelfth century, and after the 1955 restoration it was presented as perhaps the oldest Sienese painting. Through the second half of the century it was regularly cited in surveys and in the catalogue of the Sienese Pinacoteca. The Fondazione Zeri photographic archive classed it as “Anonimo senese sec. XII”, with a date range of about 1150–1199.

An important moment in this second stage, though not about attribution as such, was the treatment of the two crosses in the 1993 volume of the Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting on the origins of Florentine painting from 1100 to 1270. That volume grouped the two southern Tuscan panels with the crosses of Rosano and of San Frediano at Pisa and with a cross in the Victoria and Albert Museum (no. 850-1900). It treated them as instances of a Christus triumphans model connected with the “Renaissance of the twelfth century” and the spread of Roman artistic culture. It placed the whole group in the first half of the century, dating the Rosano cross around 1129, the year the church was consecrated under the patronage of the Guidi counts. This early dating is the main scholarly alternative to the chronology now generally adopted for the master and is discussed below.

The third stage is the 2017–18 restoration and the 2018 catalogue entry. The entry consolidated the cross’s documentary history, refined its iconographic reading, produced the first technical study of its materials, argued for a date well within the second half of the century, and conferred the name. Since then the name has been used by the diocesan museum at Pienza, the Restituzioni website and local and regional heritage portals. This research could not verify its adoption in the wider international literature, in general reference works or in museum catalogues outside Tuscany, so it would be premature to call it universally accepted.

Style and artistic culture: between Spoleto, Rome and Tuscany

What kind of painter does the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore seem to be? The most consistent answer in the literature is that his art reinterprets two traditions in a personal way. One is the Tuscan Christus triumphans type seen in the crosses of Rosano and San Frediano at Pisa, whose roots the 1993 Corpus volume placed in the Roman culture of the early twelfth century. The other is the late-twelfth-century production of Umbria, and specifically Spoleto, represented by the 1187 cross bearing Alberto Sotio’s name and by the so-called “croce azzurra” in the diocesan museum at Spoleto. According to the 2018 study, the master took from Spoleto the intense, bright colours that Umbrian painters favoured from the end of the twelfth century, and from the Tuscan tradition the general model of the triumphant Christ. To these he added a marked taste for graphic elegance, visible in the strands of Christ’s beard and the decoration of the loincloth, and above all for lively and refined colour.

The technical evidence gives this stylistic description a material basis. The exclusive use of lapis lazuli for the blues and the deliberate pairing of two red lakes point the same way. So do the shot effects, made by laying green earth over ultramarine in the border of the Virgin’s veil, or lapis over green earth in the dress of the saint at the right. The iridescent pink-blue reflections of the loincloth, mixed from lead white, red earths, green earth and lapis, confirm this. The Villore master’s “cordial language”, as Fattorini called it, was built on costly materials and a sophisticated handling of glazes and colour changes. The conservators went further and called the cross a unique historical document of twelfth-century Umbrian-Spoletine artistic culture, a formulation that leans more firmly towards an Umbrian reading than the more cautious art-historical entry.

The master’s origin is the central unresolved problem in his definition. Was he a local southern Tuscan painter who had absorbed Spoletine models, or a master trained around Spoleto who came to work in the Sienese countryside? The 2018 entry explicitly declines to decide. It notes that one cannot be sure the author of the two crosses was “the oldest of Sienese painters”, as is usually said, rather than a master who arrived in southern Tuscany from the Spoleto area, and that after more than half a century these doubts “have not been resolved”. It concludes that the master stands as a distant progenitor of the Sienese school “whether he was autochthonous or came from the Spoleto area”. Popular claims that the master was “of Spoletine origin”, or on the contrary “the first Sienese painter”, should be read as simplifications of what remains a genuinely open question.

In the same perspective, his language is described as a “symptomatic antecedent” for three later developments: cross no. 597 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena; the Maestro di Tressa, who would have worked in Sienese territory around 1215; and the painting that Margarito d’Arezzo would later spread between Arezzo and the Val di Chiana. This describes precedence and affinity within a regional development, not a documented chain of workshop transmission.

A further caution concerns the label “Alberto Sotio” itself, which runs through every discussion of the master’s sources. The Spoleto cathedral cross carries an inscription traditionally read as a signature. The national heritage catalogue record notes, however, that this attribution is now questioned because of a grammatical anomaly: the text reads “opus Alberto” rather than “opus Alberti”, so Alberto may be the dedicatee rather than the author. Fattorini’s consistent use of inverted commas for “Alberto Sotio” reflects this uncertainty.

Function, patronage and setting

If the two crosses are by the same painter or team, they show a career that served very different kinds of patron. One cross was made for the great Benedictine abbey of Sant’Antimo, an imperial foundation of exceptional wealth and prestige whose twelfth-century church was among the most ambitious Romanesque buildings in Tuscany. The other was probably made for a modest canonica of the secular clergy, in a small borgo whose lord had only recently submitted to the Commune of Siena. Fattorini noted that the canonica of San Pietro in Villore did undergo some influence from the abbey, echoing the architectural studies that connect the two buildings. One may conjecture, though no source says so, that the abbey was the channel through which a painter and his models reached the lesser church; this remains a hypothesis.

The cross’s original placement is unknown. The unpainted base with its peg holes shows that it was fitted into a further support. Fattorini recalled three scenes of the Franciscan cycle at Assisi, painted around 1290, that show crosses raised on a screen, on a beam and on an altar respectively. A 2003 study of the types and functions of Sienese panel painting judged the altar solution best suited to a building as small as San Pietro in Villore. That the cross was seen in the crypt in 1813 and 1862 shows where it had been relegated in modern times, not where it first stood. Nothing is known of the circumstances of commission, the donors, or the clergy who might have ordered either cross.

Commonly repeated errors and confusions

It may help to gather the main errors met in this research, since several appear in sources readily found online.

The first and most consequential is geographical. The master has nothing to do with the Mugello hamlet of Villore near Vicchio, whose church is San Lorenzo a Villore, or with the museum of sacred art at Vicchio. His church is San Pietro in Villore at San Giovanni d’Asso, in the province of Siena.

The second is chronological. The master is not a fourteenth-century or Giottesque painter but a Romanesque painter of the twelfth century. Dates for his cross in the thirteenth century belong to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and are superseded.

The third concerns location. The cross is in the Museo Diocesano of Pienza in the Palazzo Borgia. It is not in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena, as some outdated sources state; it was only deposited there for some decades before it was destined for Pienza. Nor is it in the church of San Pietro in Villore, where only a copy hangs.

The fourth confusion is between the two medieval paintings from the same church: the twelfth-century cross and the fourteenth-century triptych by Ugolino di Nerio, now in the Uffizi. The anonymous name “Maestro del trittico della Pieve di San Giovanni d’Asso”, proposed in the 1930s for the triptych, must not be conflated with the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore. The label “Maestro di San Giovanni d’Asso”, attached to the cross on a public image repository, has no standing in the specialist literature.

The fifth error is technical: the cross is painted on oak, not chestnut, as was believed before the 2017–18 investigation.

The sixth concerns iconography. The woman with the chalice, often described as Ecclesia, is identified in the most recent study as Mary of James. The figure on the left in blue is the Virgin, not the woman with the chalice.

The seventh concerns the status of the attribution. The name was coined only in 2018, and it is anachronistic to credit it to Perkins or Sandberg-Vavalà. They spoke respectively of a common school and of a possible common hand, but never of a “Maestro di San Pietro in Villore”.

Conclusion

The Maestro di San Pietro in Villore is a recent name for a painter who has been known, in one form or another, for a century. Gabriele Fattorini coined it in 2018, but the two crosses on which it rests were already linked by Federico Mason Perkins in 1925–26, and Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà proposed a common hand in 1929. The name therefore does not announce a discovery. It gives a convenient label to a pairing that criticism had long accepted, and it should be read as a convention, not as the recovery of an identity. Its first lesson is that of the opening section of this study: the name points to a church at San Giovanni d’Asso in the province of Siena, not to the Mugello hamlet that the toponym suggests, and to the twelfth century, not to the age of Giotto.

What can be said with confidence is limited but solid. Two painted crosses of the Christus triumphans type, one now in the Museo Diocesano at Pienza and one in the Museo Civico e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra at Montalcino, are closely related in their composition, their physiognomies, their graphic style and their construction. The Pienza cross has a documented history from 1813, a firm place in the Sienese exhibition of 1904, and since 2017–18 the most complete technical study of any twelfth-century Italian panel of its kind. The last quarter of the twelfth century is the date adopted by the most recent literature, and the church for which the cross was probably made belongs to a Romanesque reconstruction that followed the submission of Count Paltonieri to Siena in 1151. These points rest on documents, on the fabric of the objects and on a consistent line of scholarship, and they are the core of what this entry can assert.

Around that core stands a larger zone of inference, and the entry has tried to mark the boundary each time. That the cross was made for San Pietro in Villore is a reasonable supposition, which Fattorini himself held “without definitive certainty”. The reading of “Villore” as a corruption of “Vincoli” is plausible and widely accepted, but it is an interpretation. The identification of the woman with the chalice as Mary of James is the most authoritative reading, and it rests on the inscribed figures of the Porziano cross and on the Rosano cross, not on any inscription at Pienza. The attribution of the Sant’Antimo cross to the same painter, finally, is a well-founded proposal accepted in the most recent literature, and not an old consensus under that name. A reader who wants to quote the entry should keep these degrees of certainty apart.

The technical campaign of 2017–18 is the most important new contribution to the master’s definition, and it changes the terms of the discussion. It showed that the support is oak and not chestnut, and that the construction combines half-lap joints, dowels, nails, parchment strips and a canvas lining under a two-layer gesso. It also showed a refined palette in which lapis lazuli is used alone for the blues, two different red lakes are paired and shot effects are made with glazes of green earth. These findings make the master a painter of costly materials and sophisticated technique, which is difficult to square with the image of a rustic precursor of Sienese painting. They also give the stylistic description a physical basis, even though the scientists themselves stressed how few comparative studies exist. Until similar analyses are made on other crosses of the period, the singularity of these results cannot be tested.

The problem of origin remains the central question, and the sources decline to resolve it. The master may have been a local painter of the Sienese countryside who learned his colour and his graphic manner from Spoletine models, or a painter trained around Spoleto who came to work in southern Tuscany, or a member of an itinerant team. The Spoleto cross of 1187 and the “croce azzurra” in the diocesan museum provide the comparisons, but even the label “Alberto Sotio” attached to the first is now debated, since the grammar of the inscription suggests that Alberto may be the dedicatee. The conservators’ phrase, “a unique historical document of twelfth-century Umbrian-Spoletine artistic culture”, leans further towards Umbria than the art-historical entry does. The popular claims that he was “of Spoletine origin” or “the first Sienese painter” are both simplifications of an open question.

The two crosses also show what a small corpus can and cannot support. The pairing explains how a painter with Spoletine habits could serve both a great imperial abbey and a modest canonica of the secular clergy, and it suggests, though no source says so, that the abbey of Sant’Antimo may have been the channel between them. The differences within the pair, which include four mourners against two, figures overlapping the frames against figures within them, and a knotted girdle present at Sant’Antimo and absent at Pienza, show that they are variants of a model, not replicas. The relative order of the two has not been established. The master’s place in a sequence that leads to cross no. 597 in the Siena Pinacoteca, to the Maestro di Tressa and to Margarito d’Arezzo is described by the 2018 entry as an affinity and a “symptomatic antecedent”. It is not a documented line of transmission.

Chronology is the second field in which the evidence is thinner than the conventions suggest. The 1993 volume of the Corpus of Florentine Painting placed the group in the first half of the twelfth century, with the Rosano cross around 1129, and the date adopted for the master today, the last quarter of the century, rests on the stylistic and technical arguments of 2018 and on the terminus of 1151 for the church. Neither of the two crosses is dated by an inscription or a document, and the disagreement reflects wider uncertainty about the dating of Romanesque panel painting in central Italy. The honest formulation is therefore that the master worked in the second half of the twelfth century, probably towards its end. A more precise date would require new evidence, whether technical, documentary or comparative.

The study has also had to correct a number of errors that circulate in the literature and online: the Mugello confusion, the thirteenth-century date, the Pinacoteca of Siena as the cross’s location, the confusion with Ugolino di Nerio’s triptych and with the “Maestro del trittico della Pieve di San Giovanni d’Asso”, the chestnut support, the reading of the woman with the chalice as Ecclesia, and the retrospective credit given to Perkins and Sandberg-Vavalà for the name. The most useful work still to be done is not further speculation about the master’s identity. It is the technical study and publication of the Sant’Antimo cross, a full comparison of the two panels in the light of the 2018 findings, and further comparative analyses of crosses of the same period. Until then the Maestro di San Pietro in Villore is a well-defined problem more than a fully defined painter: two damaged panels, a documented history, a carefully argued attribution, and a set of questions that the next study will have to answer.