Maestro Consolo (Magister Conxolus)

Magister Conxolus, known in the historiographic tradition variously as Maestro Consolo, Magister Consolus, or simply Consolo, stands as one of the most arresting, if elusive, figures in the panorama of late-thirteenth-century Italian painting. His name survives almost exclusively through a single, definitive inscription, Magister Conxolus pinxit hoc opus, painted upon a lunette in the lower church of the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, yet that spare autograph opens a window onto a world of vigorous narrative invention, regional artistic ambition, and the complex interweaving of Roman, proto-Giottesque, and popular pictorial traditions that defined the final decades of the Duecento.

Origins, Family, and Social Milieu

The precise date and place of birth of Magister Conxolus remain unknown, as is the case with the overwhelming majority of painters active in the Italian peninsula during the second half of the thirteenth century, a period in which documentary evidence for artists of the non-courtly sphere is fragmentary at best. The only biographical data that scholars have been able to recover from archival research points firmly to Subiaco, the hill town in the Aniene valley east of Rome in the Lazio region, as the painter’s place of origin and, in all probability, the centre of his entire professional life. Nine parchments preserved in the archive of the monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco, dated between 1292 and 1328, bear the name “Consolo” in forms that relate to a local family of modest but stable social standing, recording “Benedictus Consuli de Subiaca” and “Bernardus Benedicti Consuli” as members of this clan.

The identification of these documentary “Consoli” with the painter himself was advanced by the scholar G. Salvi in a seminal 1960 article in the Bollettino d’Arte, who argued that the discrepancy between the archival spelling “Consulus” and the autograph inscription “Conxolus” on the fresco could be explained by the painter’s own orthographic irregularity, while the notaries who drafted the documents transcribed the name in its more correct Latin form. This hypothesis, while widely discussed, has not been universally accepted, and the distinguished paleographer Vincenzo Federici preferred to read the archival form as “Console,” a variant that further complicates the identification. Nevertheless, the coincidence of name, time, and locality has led most modern scholars to accept with reasonable probability that the painter Conxolus belonged to this Sublacensian family, whose members appear to have possessed various properties in the surrounding territory, suggesting a household of sufficient means to support the education and training of a son in the pictorial arts.

The social world into which Conxolus was born was that of a prosperous monastic town, dominated intellectually and economically by the twin Benedictine abbeys of Sacro Speco and Santa Scolastica, institutions whose patronage shaped virtually every dimension of cultural life in the Aniene valley during the Duecento. Families such as the Consoli of Subiaco occupied the intermediate stratum of local society, neither among the great feudal magnates nor among the landless poor, and it was from precisely this urban artisan and petty-landowning class that the workshops of central Italian painting recruited their practitioners in the late medieval period. The young Conxolus would have grown up in daily proximity to the monumental frescoes that already adorned the earlier layers of the Sacro Speco, works steeped in the Italo-Byzantine tradition that had governed religious imagery across Central Italy for generations, and this visual environment inevitably shaped his earliest aesthetic sensibilities. The family’s close ties to the Benedictine community, evident in the recurrence of their name across nine different notarial documents spanning nearly four decades, suggest a relationship of mutual dependence and trust between the Consoli household and the monastery that may well have facilitated the painter’s initial commission at the Sacro Speco.

Whether Conxolus trained locally in Subiaco under a master whose identity has been entirely lost, or whether he travelled to Rome for his formation, as the unmistakable echoes of Roman monumental painting in his mature work would suggest, cannot be determined from existing sources. The Treccani Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani notes that Conxolus’s work reveals familiarity with the major Roman masters of the period, and that his contact with this broader metropolitan tradition almost certainly involved some form of direct exposure to the workshops active in Rome during the second half of the thirteenth century. The dates of the archive documents, spanning 1292 to 1328, establish, at least provisionally, the outermost chronological boundaries within which the painter’s activity at Subiaco may be placed, suggesting a working life concentrated in the final decade of the Duecento and the earliest years of the Trecento.

Patrons and Institutional Context

The patronage of Magister Conxolus was, so far as the surviving evidence permits us to conclude, wholly monastic in character, rooted in the institutional ambitions and sacred claims of the Benedictine community of Subiaco. The Sacro Speco (the “Holy Cave”) was the most venerated site in the Benedictine world after Monte Cassino itself, for it was precisely in this rocky grotto above the Aniene river that Saint Benedict of Norcia, founder of Western monasticism, had spent his formative years of solitary asceticism in the late fifth and early sixth century, as recounted in the second book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The monastery that grew up around this cave across the early medieval centuries had, by the thirteenth century, become a site of pan-European religious significance, attracting pilgrims, papal attention, and the patronage of successive popes whose interest in the Benedictine tradition intersected with broader questions of ecclesiastical politics and monastic reform.

The most significant institutional patron in the history of the Sacro Speco’s artistic development was Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), whose pontificate coincided with a major phase of construction and decoration at the monastery. The act of foundation, the Donazione del privilegio di Innocenzo III, was commemorated in a fresco attributed by modern scholarship to a Roman painter of the first decade of the thirteenth century, a work upon which Conxolus himself later intervened, updating and reintegrating the image within his broader decorative programme for the lower church. This connection to Innocent III’s patronage, even if mediated and retrospective, placed Conxolus’s work within a prestigious ideological lineage, associating the Sacro Speco with the highest levels of papal authority and aligning the Benedictine community’s claims to institutional dignity with the most powerful office in the medieval world.

The more direct patrons of Conxolus’s own commission were the Benedictine monks of the Sacro Speco themselves, represented by the abbot and the broader monastic chapter who would have negotiated the terms of his engagement and overseen the iconographic programme of the frescoes. The decoration of the lower church was an act of deliberate cultural self-assertion on the part of the Sublacensian community: by commissioning a comprehensive cycle of the Life of Saint Benedict, the monks were not merely fulfilling a devotional function but were making a pointed statement about their community’s spiritual authority and the sacred geography of their monastery. The scholar Fabio Mari has argued, in a particularly illuminating article published in Convivium in 2021, that the iconographic choices of the cycle, the consistent portrayal of Benedict within his grotto, the sacralisation of the Aniene landscape, and the implicit parallels with Francis of Assisi’s grotto experiences, constituted a Benedictine “response to the Franciscan challenge” at a moment when the mendicant orders were asserting their own spiritual prestige with enormous cultural force.

The Council of Lyons of 1274 had reignited debate about the role and legitimacy of the various religious orders, and the Benedictines of Subiaco were acutely aware of the competitive pressure exerted by the Franciscans, whose famous basilica at Assisi, decorated with the most ambitious pictorial cycle of the age, had established a new standard for commemorative sacred art. In this context, the commission given to Conxolus carried a weight that far exceeded mere aesthetic decoration: it was a theological and institutional act, intended to establish the historical priority and spiritual depth of the Benedictine tradition vis-à-vis the newcomers of the mendicant world. The formal parallels between the Stories of Saint Benedict in the lower church of the Sacro Speco and the Stories of Saint Francis in the upper church of the basilica at Assisi are, as modern scholars have noted, too systematic to be coincidental, extending beyond shared stylistic sources to encompass the very structure and sequence of the narrative programme.

The portrait bust of Pope Innocent III incorporated into the decorative scheme of the lower church served a further patronal function, linking the living Benedictine community to the historical papacy and invoking the protective authority of one of the medieval church’s most powerful pontiffs. Conxolus’s treatment of this image, stiff, hieratic, and formulaic compared to the vivacity of the hagiographic scenes, suggests that the bust was executed according to a relatively conventional official formula dictated by the institutional demands of the commission rather than by the painter’s own pictorial instincts. The inclusion of the bust nonetheless demonstrates the political sophistication of the monastic patrons, who understood the value of aligning their community’s visual programme with the prestige of papal authority in a period of intense ecclesiastical competition.

The frescoes of the lower church were executed, in all probability, in the final decade of the thirteenth century, during a phase of reconstruction and enlargement of the church that had been ongoing since the time of Innocent III. The Sacro Speco thus exemplifies the broader phenomenon, well documented in thirteenth-century Italy, of monastic communities investing in large-scale pictorial decoration as an instrument of institutional identity, pilgrimage attraction, and theological argument, a phenomenon in which the roles of patron and artist were always negotiated within a framework of shared religious purpose and institutional strategy. It should be noted that the collaboration between Conxolus and one or more assistants, attested by the stylistic variations within the cycle, further complicates the reconstruction of the patronal relationship, since the exact terms of the commission who received payment, how the work was divided, what iconographic instructions were provided by the monks, remain entirely undocumented.

Painting Style

The painting style of Magister Conxolus occupies a distinctive position within the complex artistic geography of late-thirteenth-century Italy, combining elements of the Roman monumental tradition with a vivid narrative energy that looks forward, however tentatively, to the revolutionary innovations of Giotto without achieving the full spatial and psychological coherence of that master’s art. Adolfo Venturi, writing in his monumental Storia dell’arte italiana of 1907, famously dismissed Conxolus as an orecchiante, a term connoting someone who picks up others’ ideas imperfectly, hearing rather than truly understanding, of the great Roman masters, a characterisation that captures the provincial, secondhand quality of the painter’s engagement with metropolitan models while perhaps understating the genuine inventiveness that animates his best work. More recent scholarship, less inflected by the hierarchical assumptions of Venturi’s positivist art history, has tended to revalue Conxolus’s place within the broader ecology of “popular” and narrative Roman painting, recognising him as one of the most accomplished practitioners of a tradition that, while distinct from the court art of Cavallini and Torriti, served equally important functions in the religious life of the medieval community.

The most immediately striking quality of Conxolus’s frescoes is their narrative fluency, what Guglielmo Matthiae, in his essential 1966 monograph Pittura romana del Medio Evo, described as the “fascino delle cose semplici, dette con vocabolario ristretto” (the charm of simple things spoken with a limited vocabulary). Each scene from the Life of Saint Benedict is presented with a directness and clarity that recalls the tonal simplicity of Gregory the Great’s own narrative prose in the Dialogues, the literary source on which the pictorial programme depends, and Conxolus appears to have grasped intuitively the pastoral function of his images: they were intended not for sophisticated metropolitan viewers but for pilgrims and monks who needed to read the life of the founder as a coherent, spiritually accessible story. The economy of means, that is a limited cast of figures, simple architectural backdrops, schematic but recognisable landscape elements, is both a technical limitation and a deliberate rhetorical strategy, creating images that communicate their message with unmistakable clarity to a heterogeneous audience of viewers of varying sophistication.

In compositional terms, Conxolus relies consistently on a small repertory of figural types and spatial conventions: Benedict is almost invariably shown frontally or in three-quarter view within the iconically schematised grotto that functions as his permanent attribute throughout the cycle; the secondary figures that populate the scenes, disciples, tormentors, miraculous intercessors, are arranged in symmetrical or near-symmetrical formations that owe more to the organisational logic of Byzantine narrative painting than to the emergent naturalism of the Roman school. The representation of the landscape, particularly in episodes such as the scene of the lake and the treatment of the rocky terrain around the grotto, employs a shorthand symbolism, undulating blue bands for water, jagged ochre formations for rock, that is entirely conventional within the Central Italian tradition but is applied by Conxolus with a sureness of touch that prevents it from seeming merely mechanical. Matthiae noted critically that this recurrence of stereotyped motifs, the repeated grotto figure, the schematic lake, reveals the “limits of the painter,” but even this acknowledgment is coupled with recognition of the narrative vitality that Conxolus generates within these constraints.

The colouring of the frescoes, where it survives in sufficient condition to be assessed, is characterised by a warm, earthy palette in which ochres, umbers, and terre verte are dominant, punctuated by stronger accents of red, blue, and white in the draperies and by the faded but still legible azurite tones of the sky zones. This chromatic range is consistent with the technical practices of Central Italian wall painting in the late Duecento and shows no evidence of the brilliant, jewel-like colour contrasts that distinguish the work of the major Roman masters; rather, Conxolus’s palette has the muted, organic warmth of a provincial workshop tradition that draws on available pigments without reaching for the costly ultramarine and gold leaf employed in more prestigious decorative programmes. The ornamental framework of the frescoes, the twisted columns, bands of geometric ornament, and painted corbel arches that border and organise the pictorial field, is handled with considerable decorative confidence, drawing on a vocabulary of architectural illusionism that was a common property of the Romano-Campanian workshop tradition but is here deployed with a certain local personality.

In the treatment of the human figure, Conxolus reveals both the promise and the limitation of his art with particular clarity. The standing figures in the more ceremonial compositions, the Virgin in the signed lunette, the bust of Innocent III, the Saints in the roundels, are depicted with the controlled rigidity of the Italo-Byzantine tradition: draperies fall in heavy, parallel folds defined by sharp highlighting; faces are rendered with wide, almond-shaped eyes set in schematic oval skulls, with little modelling of the cheeks or forehead and virtually no psychological individualisation. In the narrative scenes, however, where the demands of storytelling force Conxolus beyond the ceremonial formula, the figures become noticeably more animated and engaged: gestures are emphatic and legible, postures respond to the specific action of each episode, and there is a genuine attempt, however imperfect, to convey the drama of miraculous events through bodily expression rather than mere emblematic placement.

The relationship of Conxolus’s style to the emergent naturalism of Giotto has been a persistent topic of critical debate. Roberto Longhi and Pietro Toesca, two of the most authoritative voices in twentieth-century Italian art history, both detected in the Subiaco frescoes signs of Conxolus’s awareness of the Assisi cycle, either the frescoes attributed to the circle of Cimabue or the early Giottesque interventions, without fully resolving the question of whether this awareness preceded or followed Conxolus’s own work at the Sacro Speco. Raimond Van Marle, writing from a broader European perspective, went further and designated Conxolus a “precursor of Giotto” in respect of his narrative realism. The more cautious formulation of the Treccani Dizionario Biografico, that Conxolus was familiar with the work of the major Roman masters but remained ultimately bound to the popular and narrative tradition of Roman painting, seems the most defensible position, acknowledging his genuine responsiveness to the most advanced art of his time while situating him firmly within a tradition of communal, didactic imagery that had its own integrity and its own sophisticated audience.

The relationship of Conxolus’s hand to the portions of the cycle attributed by some scholars to a collaborator or collaborators introduces a further dimension of stylistic complexity that modern scholarship has not fully resolved. Federico Hermanin, in his early-twentieth-century study of the Sublacensian monasteries, attributed the entire decorative programme of the lower church, including the higher-quality scenes of the Stories of Saint Benedict, to Conxolus alone, classifying him as a true caposcuola (founder of a school). A significant strand of more recent criticism, however, has argued that the stylistic variations within the cycle, particularly the superior compositional organisation and spatial depth of certain scenes compared to the relative flatness of others, indicate the involvement of at least one additional hand, perhaps a collaborator trained in the Roman workshops who had absorbed more directly the lessons of Cavallini’s classicising naturalism. This debate is unlikely to be definitively resolved without new documentary evidence or more systematic technical analysis of the painted surfaces.

Artistic Influences

The artistic formation of Magister Conxolus cannot be reconstructed in precise biographical terms, but the visual evidence of his frescoes permits a reasonably confident mapping of the main currents that shaped his pictorial language, placing him at the intersection of several distinct traditions that co-existed and competed in Central Italy during the second half of the Duecento. The dominant strand in his training was almost certainly the Romano-Campanian tradition of monumental wall painting, a broad current encompassing the frescoes of the atrium of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome, the decorations of various Laziale churches, and the vast productive network of workshops active in Rome and its hinterland throughout the thirteenth century. It is to this tradition, rather than to the elevated court art of Pietro Cavallini, that Conxolus most fundamentally belongs: his narrative economy, his schematic landscape conventions, and his direct, unrhetorical figure style are all characteristic features of this popular-monumental strain of Roman painting, which Claudia Refice and other scholars have identified as a coherent and artistically significant parallel to the more celebrated achievements of the Roman masters.

The influence of Pietro Cavallini, the greatest Roman painter of the age and a figure whose work represented the most advanced synthesis of Byzantine heritage and nascent classical naturalism in late-thirteenth-century Italy, has been a recurring point of reference in the critical literature on Conxolus. Hermanin, as noted above, went so far as to include Conxolus among Cavallini’s collaborators at the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a claim that, if correct, would place the Sublacensian master at the very heart of the most progressive Roman workshop of the period. This identification has not been substantiated by subsequent scholarship, but the parallels in figural type, drapery convention, and spatial organisation between aspects of the Subiaco cycle and Cavallini’s documented work are real enough to suggest at minimum that Conxolus had access, whether in person or through secondary transmission, to the stylistic innovations being developed in Cavallini’s workshop during the 1290s.

The mosaic tradition, still potently alive in Rome through the work of Jacopo Torriti and his contemporaries, also left visible traces on Conxolus’s pictorial vocabulary. The roundels containing the busts of Christ, Saint Benedict, and Saint Scholastica in the lower church, formal, hieratic, enclosed in their geometric frames, recall the tondo convention of mosaic decoration, translated into fresco medium with a dignity that shows the painter’s respect for the grandeur of the older tradition even as he operates within the more modest and flexible medium of wall painting. The influence of the mosaic tradition is also detectable in the gold-ground portions of the decorative programme and in the handling of certain nimbus details, where the crisp, linear quality of mosaic tessellation is evoked through the precise application of painted gilding.

The Assisi frescoes, particularly the vast cycle of the Life of Saint Francis in the upper church of the basilica, executed in the 1290s by the Cimabue workshop and its associates, constitute a further and particularly complex layer of influence on Conxolus’s work. The structural parallels between the Assisi cycle and the Subiaco Stories of Saint Benedict noted by modern scholars extend beyond shared stylistic vocabulary to encompass the very logic of hagiographic narration, the selection of episodes, their sequential deployment along the walls, the integration of landscape and architecture as markers of narrative location, suggesting that the monks of the Sacro Speco and their painter were consciously modelling their programme on the prestige example of the Franciscan basilica. Whether Conxolus himself visited Assisi, or whether his knowledge of the cycle was mediated through drawings, descriptions, or the testimony of other painters, cannot be determined from surviving evidence.

The influence of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the literary source from which the iconographic programme of the Benedict cycle derives almost entirely, should also be acknowledged as a formative force, even if it is a literary rather than strictly visual influence. Conxolus’s images faithfully follow the Gregorian narrative in their selection and sequencing of episodes, and the tone of the paintings, calm, luminous, accessible, free from the apocalyptic intensity of some contemporary hagiographic imagery, reflects the pastoral clarity of Gregory’s prose in a manner that suggests the painter had either read the text himself or worked from a detailed programme prepared by the monks that communicated the text’s essential character along with its narrative content. This literary-visual correspondence is itself a mark of the sophistication of the commission and of the painter’s responsiveness to the intellectual intentions of his patrons.

Travels and Geographical Horizons

The question of Conxolus’s geographical mobility, whether he remained entirely within the orbit of Subiaco and its immediate region, or whether he undertook journeys to Rome or further afield that exposed him directly to the most advanced art of his time, cannot be answered with certainty from existing documentation. The visual evidence of the frescoes, however, argues convincingly for at least some direct exposure to Roman monumental painting, and the stylistic parallels with works executed in Rome, particularly the frescoes of the atrium of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, are specific enough to suggest personal acquaintance rather than mere secondary derivation. Given the geographical relationship between Subiaco and Rome, a distance of some sixty kilometres, manageable in a day or two of travel along the ancient Via Valeria, it is entirely plausible that Conxolus made regular journeys to the capital, whether as a journeyman painter seeking training and employment or as an established master travelling to study the works of more prestigious colleagues.

The question of a possible journey to Assisi is more speculative but has been seriously entertained by modern scholars in light of the structural parallels between the Sacro Speco cycle and the Assisi Stories of Saint Francis. If Conxolus did indeed travel to Assisi, a journey of some 150 kilometres from Subiaco, passing through the Umbrian uplands, he would have encountered the most ambitious pictorial programme in Central Italy, a work of staggering scale and formal complexity that challenged every assumption of the Romano-Byzantine tradition in which he had been formed. The fact that the parallels between the two cycles are structural as well as stylistic, extending to the sequence and selection of narrative episodes, not merely to individual figural motifs, lends some weight to the hypothesis of a direct visit, since these deeper compositional resonances are less easily explained by secondary transmission than by first-hand observation.

The broader cultural geography within which Conxolus operated was that of the Lazio and its monastic networks, a world in which the great abbeys of the Aniene valley (Subiaco, Farfa, Montecassino) maintained close institutional relationships with Rome and with each other, facilitating the circulation of artists, patrons, and iconographic programmes across the region. The Sacro Speco itself was not a provincial backwater: it attracted papal visits, hosted ecclesiastical councils, and served as a stage for the assertion of Benedictine primacy at moments of intense institutional competition, and the presence of sophisticated pilgrims and ecclesiastics within its walls would have ensured that its artistic programme was exposed to the critical scrutiny of viewers with broad visual experience. In this sense, the very success of Conxolus’s commission at Subiaco may have generated further opportunities for travel and recognition within the broader monastic and clerical world of central Italy.

The hypothesis, advanced by some scholars, that Conxolus may have collaborated in Roman workshops, specifically in the workshop of Pietro Cavallini at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, would imply a period of residence in Rome of some duration, sufficient for him to be integrated into a major ongoing commission. While this claim has not been substantiated, it serves as a reminder that the movement of painters between urban workshops and monastic patrons was a normal feature of the medieval artistic economy, and that the boundaries between Roman metropolitan painting and its Laziale provincial extensions were far more permeable than the retrospective categorisations of art history sometimes suggest. The archives of Santa Scolastica, which record members of the Consoli family across the decades from 1292 to 1328, suggest that whatever travels the painter may have undertaken, he maintained his roots in Subiaco throughout his documented career, returning always to the community and landscape that had shaped him.

Death: An Unresolvable Absence

The date and cause of death of Magister Conxolus are entirely unknown, as is the case with virtually every biographical detail about him beyond what can be inferred from archival documents and visual analysis. The last archival traces that have been tentatively associated with the painter’s family in the Santa Scolastica archive are dated to 1328, providing a terminus post quem that has led scholars to place his death sometime in the early decades of the fourteenth century, though this inference remains purely conjectural. Given the typical life expectancy and career patterns of medieval craftsmen, and given the probable date of the Sacro Speco frescoes in the final decade of the thirteenth century, a death in the first quarter of the fourteenth century would be consistent with a painter who was already a mature master at the time of his major commission. No epitaph, obituary, or funerary inscription commemorating Conxolus has been identified, and his burial place, whether within the precincts of the Sacro Speco itself or in some other site in or around Subiaco, remains entirely unknown.

Principal Works and Their Iconography

The entire corpus of works attributed to Magister Conxolus is located within the lower church of the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, formally the monastery of San Benedetto, a rupestrian sanctuary built into the cliffs of the Aniene valley in the hills of the Sublacensian Appennine, east of Rome, where it remains in situ under the care of the Benedictine community to this day. The church is not a freestanding building in the conventional sense but a series of interconnected chambers carved partly from the living rock and partly constructed, their walls entirely covered with layers of fresco decoration accumulated over several centuries; Conxolus’s contributions, executed in the final decade of the thirteenth century, overlay an earlier decorative stratum and constitute the most substantial and coherent artistic programme in the lower church.

The Virgin Mary, Christ child and two angels

The signed work, and the only piece to which Conxolus’s authorship is absolutely certain by documentary evidence, is the Lunette with the Virgin and Child Between Two Angels, painted in a small apsidal niche (absidiola) within the lower church, accompanied by the inscription Magister Conxolus pinxit hoc opus. The composition presents the enthroned Virgin in a rigidly frontal posture, the Christ Child held in her lap in the manner of the Byzantine Hodegetria type, with an angel kneeling or standing on either side in attitudes of adoration. The throne behind the Virgin is represented as a canopied baldachin, an architectural motif derived from late-Duecento Roman workshop practice, though executed, as the Treccani notes, with a certain instability in the architectural drawing that reveals the painter’s distance from the most refined metropolitan models. The angels are depicted with a provincial freshness, their draperies simplified and their gestures direct, that distinguishes them from the more sophisticated angelic figures of Cavallini’s or Torriti’s Roman work while giving the lunette its characteristic warmth and immediacy. The painting has been described as an “opera di gusto provinciale, impreziosita da una certa freschezza” (a work of provincial taste, embellished by a certain freshness), and this characterisation captures both its limitations and its genuine appeal with accuracy.

The Cycle of the Stories of Saint Benedict covers almost the entirety of the wall surface of the lower church and constitutes, despite the debates about the extent of Conxolus’s personal authorship, the most important artistic programme associated with his name. The cycle follows the narrative of Saint Benedict’s life as recounted in the second book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues (c. 593–594), specifically the episodes relating to the saint’s childhood, his departure from Rome, his years of solitary asceticism at Subiaco, and the miracles performed during his residence in the Aniene valley. The scenes are arranged sequentially along the walls, creating a coherent narrative path that the pilgrim or monk could follow in the manner of a sacred itinerary, with each episode constituting a visual chapter of the hagiographic text. The First Miracle depicts the moment, recorded by Gregory, in which Benedict performs his first supernatural act, the restoration of a broken tray, a scene handled by Conxolus with a directness and narrative economy that establishes the characteristic tone of the entire cycle. The Vestition (Vestizione) represents the symbolic moment of Benedict’s assumption of the monastic garb, the adoption of the rough habit, an episode charged with the commemorative significance of an initiation rite and depicted by Conxolus with an appropriate solemnity that distinguishes it from the more animated miraculous scenes.

Miracle of the Servant

The Miracle of the Goth depicts the episode in which a “gotus”, meaning servant or worker, who was mowing grass near the artificial lake built by St. Benedict himself, had the blade of the sickle detached from the handle and fell into the lake. The servant, in despair, brought Benedict the simple stick without the blade. The painted scene articulates the story in two distinct moments, read from left to right: on the left, the servant hands St. Benedict the stick without the sickle that had fallen into the lake; on the right, St. Benedict dips the stick into the water, and the sickle miraculously rejoins it. The literary source of the episode is Book II of the Dialogues by Gregory the Great, the main Benedictine hagiography, which recounts how Benedict returned the tool to the servant without anything being lost.

The Miracle of Saint Mauro Walking on Water (San Mauro che cammina sulle acque) presents one of the most celebrated episodes in the Gregorian narrative, the moment when the disciple Maurus, commanded by Benedict in a vision to save the drowning novice Placidus, walks across the surface of the lake in a direct parallel to the Gospel account of Peter’s walk on the Sea of Galilee. This scene requires the representation of a convincing body of water, and it is here that Conxolus deploys his characteristic shorthand for the aquatic element, undulating blue bands, in a manner that, as Matthiae observed, communicates the required narrative information through symbolic convention rather than naturalistic observation. The Poisoned Bread (Il Pane avvelenato) depicts the episode in which a priest, moved by envy, sends Benedict a loaf of poisoned bread; a raven summoned by the saint carries the bread away before it can cause harm, and Conxolus renders the bird as a large, emblematic black form whose dramatic gesture of beak-seizing the loaf provides the compositional focus of the scene.

The Life in the Grotto (Vita nella grotta) constitutes perhaps the most iconographically original and theologically resonant image in the entire cycle, a scene, or series of related scenes, depicting Benedict’s years of solitary retreat in the cave above the Aniene river, during which, nourished by the monk Romano and sustained by divine grace, he underwent the spiritual transformation that would eventually make him the founder of Western monasticism. Conxolus renders the grotto as a large, schematically drawn cave opening, a visual attribute that becomes so persistently associated with Benedict throughout the cycle that it functions almost as an iconographic signature, identifying the saint in the same way that an attribute-object identifies other holy figures. The landscape surrounding the grotto, the rocky Aniene cliffs, the trees of the Sublacensian forest, is depicted not as mere backdrop but as a specifically identified and sacralised place, charged with the spiritual associations of the site for which the painting was made and for whose monastic community it was intended. The modern scholar Fabio Mari has identified this consistent sacralisation of the Sublacensian landscape in Conxolus’s frescoes as a deliberate strategy of territorial identity, whereby the Benedictine community used visual art to establish their claim of ownership, spiritual and ultimately institutional, over the sacred landscape that surrounded them.

Bust of Pope Innocent III

The Bust of Pope Innocent III (Busto del papa Innocenzo III) depicts a front view of the pontiff’s bust, set within an apse-like or circular composition against a deep blue-gray background. Innocent III is portrayed wearing the single-crown tiara—the papal camelaucum in the form that preceded the addition of the second crown by Boniface VIII in 1298—decorated with bands of geometric meander motifs, typically Cosmatesque in ornamental style, filled with white and brown and gold bands. The cope is carmine red, the papal color par excellence, over which is draped the white pallium with small black Greek crosses, a liturgical insignia that distinguishes the pontiff and metropolitans.

The face is oval, serene, almost expressionless in its solemnity: the eyes are slightly asymmetrical, the nose straight, the mouth small and closed. Critics have unanimously noted a certain lack of physiognomic characterization in the figure—Toesca called it “poorly characterized”—as if the painter had favored the emblematic function of the character (the holder of the bull of donation to the monastery) over individual rendering. The modeling of the face shows a sober plasticity that stands out from the flat frontality of the archaic Byzantine tradition: the volumes are suggested, not just delimited by the outline, revealing the painter’s knowledge of contemporary Roman painting of the late thirteenth century.