Bonaventura Berlinghieri

Bonaventura Berlinghieri is a painter with a documented life of almost half a century, from 1228 to 1274, but with only one surviving work: the gabled panel of Saint Francis¹ and six scenes, signed and dated 1235, still in San Francesco at Pescia. Everything else said about him is either documentary fragment, informed hypothesis or inherited error.

Introduction: a painter, a panel and the problem of a name

Few painters of the Italian thirteenth century occupy so large a place in the history of art on so slender a material basis as Bonaventura Berlinghieri. His reputation rests on a single object, a panel painted in tempera and gold, crowned by a gable, on which the full-length figure of Francis of Assisi stands between six small narrative scenes, three on each side. The panel bears a date, 1235, and a name, and it has remained in the Franciscan church of Pescia, in the Valdinievole between Lucca and Pistoia, for as long as any record of it exists. Since its inscription was read in the middle of the nineteenth century it has served, in the words of Antonino Caleca’s entry in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, as a “caposaldo”, a fixed point, for the classification of thirteenth-century Tuscan painting. Around it a large corpus of works gradually gathered, most of which, as Caleca himself concluded, can hardly be attributed to Bonaventura in the present state of research.

This essay attempts to separate the documented from the inferred and the inferred from the erroneous. Its method is deliberately stratified. Some statements rest on documents, surviving only as later copies, that place Bonaventura in Lucca at particular moments; some rest on the inscription painted on the Pescia panel; some rest on attributions that have found broad but not universal acceptance; some are hypotheses advanced by individual scholars; and some are errors that, through repetition in encyclopaedias and on the internet, have acquired a spurious authority.

The discussion rests chiefly on the work of Edward Garrison, who in the early 1950s reconstructed both the documentary history of the Lucchese painters and the history of the Pescia dossal; and Antonino Caleca, whose discovery of the signature on the Fucecchio cross transformed our understanding of Bonaventura’s father and whose encyclopaedia entries of 1992 remain the most compact critical synthesis. Other contributions, older and newer, are acknowledged here without names, as the positions of “critics” or “scholars”, in keeping with the purpose of an essay that seeks to give a clear account rather than a catalogue of opinions.

The very name by which the painter is known demands a first correction. “Bonaventura Berlinghieri” is a modern construction. The thirteenth-century documents speak of Bonaventura, son of Berlinghiero, and the 1967 entry of the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani states plainly that the patronymic “Berlinghieri”, habitually used as a surname, is an arbitrary usage dating back no further than the nineteenth century. Garrison’s own preferred form, “Bonaventura di Berlinghiero”, is closer to the medieval reality. The conventional form is retained in this essay simply because it is the one under which the painter is catalogued in museums, encyclopaedias and the national catalogue of Italian cultural heritage; but the reader should bear in mind that no medieval contemporary would have recognised it as a family name. The inscription on the Pescia panel itself is read by the national catalogue as A(NNO) D(OMINI) MCCXXXV BONAVENTURA BERLINGHIERIUS; the form with de Luca quoted below belongs to the lost panel at Guiglia.

Lucca, Volterra and the family workshop

The earliest notice of Bonaventura belongs to a moment of high political significance for his city. In March 1228 the commune of Lucca concluded a peace with Pisa, and a long list of Lucchese citizens swore to observe it. Among them appear Berlinghiero and two of his sons, Barone and Bonaventura. The precise day is itself a matter of disagreement in the reference literature: the Dizionario Biografico dates the oath to 22 March 1228, while Caleca’s entry on Berlinghiero gives 25 March. The difference cannot be resolved here, and it is best stated openly rather than silently harmonised. What matters more is the nature of the evidence. The original parchment does not survive; the list is known only through a later transcription preserved in the Biblioteca Statale of Lucca, manuscript 1902. The older dictionary entry describes it as a seventeenth-century copy made by the friar Marco Grossi, who does not name his source; Caleca speaks instead of “eighteenth-century copies”. Either way, the foundation of the painter’s biography rests on a copy of uncertain filiation, and every inference drawn from it must carry that qualification.

Two inferences are nevertheless reasonable. The first is that Bonaventura was already an adult in 1228, since only those of age could swear such an oath; Caleca accordingly placed his birth in the first decade of the thirteenth century. The second is that the family was established in Lucca and integrated into its civic life. The father appears in the copy under a form that the dictionary, following Garrison’s transcription, gives as “Berlinghierus Melanese maius”, and that Caleca gives as “Berlingerius Melanese Maius”. Garrison read this as “Berlinghiero son of Melanese the elder”, taking “Melanese” as a personal name, the name of Berlinghiero’s own father, and not as an adjective of origin.

This reading disposes of one of the most persistent errors in the literature on the family. The notion that Berlinghiero came from Milan goes back, as the dictionary explains, to a misreading of the document and its translation into English by the two nineteenth-century authors of the first great history of Italian painting in that language. From there it passed into the general literature: the Enciclopedia Italiana of 1930 still called Berlinghiero “of Milanese origin”. The family was not Lombard, and the name “Melanese” tells us about a grandfather, not about a city.

The true origin of the father emerged only in 1981, and it emerged from paint rather than parchment. During the restoration of a painted cross from the church of San Salvatore at Fucecchio, once in the diocese of Lucca, a signature was uncovered that reads BERLINGERIUS VULTERRANUS ME PINXIT. Caleca, who published the discovery, drew the obvious conclusion: Berlinghiero was a native of Volterra. The Fucecchio cross is today divided, its main part with the triumphant Christ and the mourning Virgin and John in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, and a terminal panel with a deacon saint and Saint Barbara in the civic museum at Fucecchio.

Caleca placed the Fucecchio cross in the final years of Berlinghiero’s activity and noted its affinity with the Pescia panel; he saw the father, at the end of his career, responding to the pathos of the Pisan painter Giunta. This Volterran origin also explains the cultural roots of the workshop. Caleca traced Berlinghiero’s formation to the strongly Hellenising milieu of western Tuscany, and specifically to the team of illuminators active between Pisa and Volterra who decorated, in 1168, the Bible made for San Vito in Pisa, now at the Certosa di Calci, under the direction of Vivianus and the Volterran Adalbertus. These miniaturists, he argued, drew on the Tuscan variant of the Umbro-Roman giant Bibles but also showed first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, both Constantinopolitan and Sicilian-Norman. It is from this soil that the language of Bonaventura grew.

Berlinghiero’s other signed work is the cross from the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Lucca, now in the Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi, signed simply “Berlingerius me pinxit”. It deserves mention here for a curious reason. In the online national catalogue of Italian cultural heritage, the entry for this cross carries in its heading an attribution to “Berlinghieri Bonaventura (attribuito)”, while the text of the same entry explains that Berlinghiero was the signatory of the Lucchese cross and the founder of a family of artists. The heading is evidently a data error and should not be taken as a scholarly attribution of the father’s signed cross to the son.

The incidental mentions of Berlinghiero’s name as the patronymic of his sons show him alive between 1232 and 1235 and dead from 1236 onward, according to Caleca; the older dictionary entry, working with less evidence, placed his death more broadly between 1228 and 1243. Caleca’s narrower bracket is the one that later documentary research supports. If Berlinghiero had two adult sons in 1228, he was probably born around 1175, a hypothesis that Caleca advanced with appropriate caution.

Bonaventura’s own documentary trail after 1228 is thin but suggestive. He is recorded in Lucca in 1232, a notice published in 1980 in the journal Prospettiva in an article devoted to new documents on Bonaventura and Marco. In 1244 he undertook to decorate a room belonging to the canonry of Lucca cathedral with birds and other motifs, according to the wishes of the sculptor Lombardo, who was then working on the cathedral building site.

This lost commission is precious, because it shows the painter engaged not in devotional panel painting but in ornamental decoration of a domestic interior, and working under the direction of a sculptor. Lombardo was the son of Guidetto, the master who had shaped the façade of San Martino; a recent study of the Lombard sculptor Guido Bigarelli has noted that Lombardo held Venetian silver coins in 1238, a detail that hints at the wide horizons of the craftsmen active around the cathedral in the years when the portals were being carved. Bonaventura’s room is lost, but the contract places him within the most ambitious artistic enterprise of his city.

In 1250 Bonaventura stood surety for his brother Marco. In 1266 he appears in a document concerning his deceased stepson, Lupardo di Benincasa, the son of donna Pina, Bonaventura’s second wife. Lupardo, the document reveals, had been trained in his stepfather’s workshop before going to Sardinia and then to Sicily, where he had died around 1258, presumably practising the art of painting. No work by Lupardo is known, but the episode opens a rare window on the mobility of Tuscan painters in the mid-thirteenth century and on the domestic structure of a workshop, in which a stepson could be apprenticed alongside sons and brothers. The last notice of Bonaventura dates from 1274. Nothing is known of his death. The dates “1210–1287”, which circulate in popular reference works and online, have no documentary basis whatever; they appear to be the residue of older approximations hardened into apparent fact.

Bonaventura was not the only painter among Berlinghiero’s sons. Barone, perhaps the eldest, is mentioned in 1225, and Caleca’s account adds three acts concerning important commissions: in 1243 a panel for the archdeacon of Lucca, in 1256 a cross for Casabasciana, near Bagni di Lucca, and in 1282 a cross, a Madonna and a Saint Andrew for the church of Sant’Alessandro in Lucca. The older Enciclopedia Italiana gives a somewhat different sequence of dates and objects, a discrepancy that reflects the uneven state of documentary publication rather than any substantive controversy. No signed work by Barone survives, and the attempts to reconstruct his oeuvre by assembling a group of Florentine and Lucchese panels under his name have, as Caleca put it, been in vain.

Marco, perhaps the youngest, is documented in Lucca in 1232, 1236 and 1239. In 1250 he received payment for illuminating a Bible for the hospital of San Martino in Lucca, a manuscript that Garrison identified with codex 1 of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Lucca. Garrison also identified him with the “Marcus pictor de Luca” who decorated a sacramentary for Camaldoli², now in the British Library as Egerton 3036, with the Marco of Lucca paid in 1255 for painting in the chapel of the Podestà’s palace in Bologna, and with the Marco enrolled in 1259 in the Bolognese Società dei Toschi³. The identifications rest largely on the improbability that two painters of the same name and region worked at the same time in Bologna; they are plausible, but, as Caleca was careful to say, not quite certain. The great German artists’ lexicon included Marco among those who swore the peace of 1228, but the Dizionario Biografico points out that this is an error: the copy of the oath names only the father, Barone and Bonaventura.

What emerges from this documentary mosaic is less the biography of an individual than the profile of a family enterprise. A father from Volterra, settled in Lucca by the 1220s; three sons, all painters, one active also as a decorator of interiors, one as an illuminator who worked as far afield as Bologna, one whose works are entirely lost; a stepson trained in the shop who died in Sicily. Caleca drew the methodological consequence with great clarity: the documents attest the extensive activity of three sons, and it is highly probable that father and sons often worked together. The difficulty of reconstructing a reliable catalogue for any one of them follows directly from this collective mode of production.

Saint Francis and Six Stories

The Stigmatization on La Verna (upper left)

The scene that opens the left column is the only episode on the panel that bears directly on Francis’s body as it appears in the central figure. In the upper field Bonaventura sets a six-winged seraph, painted in an intense red, against the gold ground; below it Francis kneels on a mountain of faceted, layered rock, turned in profile towards the apparition with both hands raised. The composition is built on a diagonal running from the kneeling saint to the winged creature. That axis cuts across the strict vertical rhythm of the flanking buildings and gives the small scene an upward pull. The vision itself is condensed to two elements, the seraph and the saint, with the mountain serving both as setting and as visual pedestal for the encounter.

The textual source is the account in Book II of Thomas of Celano⁴’s Vita prima. It relates how, about two years before his death, in a hermitage called La Verna, Francis saw a man like a seraph with six wings, fixed to a cross, and how the signs of the nails afterwards appeared in his hands and feet. In this earliest version the stigmata appear some time after the vision, and the explicit identification of the seraph with Christ belongs to the later rewriting of the episode in Bonaventure of Bagnoregio⁵’s Legenda maior of 1263. In the panel the seraph stands alone in the sky, with no rays linking it to the saint’s body; the formula of rays joining wound to wound would only come with later painters. The national catalogue reads the figure as double: a seraph from whose wings emerge the hands and feet of a crucified man, with the head of an angel and without the cross that Celano describes. In the photograph reproduced here the hands and feet cannot be made out, and the seraph appears as a red, six-winged figure with a small face at its centre. Two readings are therefore possible, a winged seraph standing alone, with no rays and no cross, as the photograph shows, and the catalogue’s seraph with crucified limbs showing through the wings; the image as reproduced does not decide between them.

The choice to place the Stigmatization at the head of the cycle is in itself an assertion: the panel displays both the wounds in the central figure, which the national catalogue notes on the hands and feet, and the event that produced them. The narrative scene and the stigmata shown frontally in the large figure confirm each other. The small panel explains the marks the faithful see on the hands and feet of the standing saint.

The architecture deserves attention. At the left rises a tall tower or church front built of alternating bands of pink and white, with a red roof and an arched doorway closed by a door patterned in a red lozenge design; at the right a second cluster of towers closes the space. These buildings have no topographical function, since La Verna was a hermitage on a wooded mountain. They act rather as stage wings, a convention inherited from Byzantine narrative painting, in which architecture marks out the theatre of the action rather than describing a place. The same device recurs in all six scenes and gives the lateral columns a uniform rhythm.

The rock formations reveal Bonaventura’s debt to Byzantine pictorial models, which Antonino Caleca identified as the basis of the language of both Berlinghiero and his son. The mountain is built of stepped, sharply contoured slabs, lit along their edges, a formula familiar from Byzantine icons and miniatures, where the rocky landscape is treated as a sequence of crystalline planes. Yet within this inherited vocabulary the kneeling figure is set with clarity and economy. The dark habit stands out against the pale rock, and the profile pose separates Francis from the frontal, iconic presentation of the central figure. This contrast between narrative profile and hieratic frontality runs through the whole panel.

The state of the scene reflects the panel’s long history. The restoration by Alfio del Serra in 1981–1982 removed earlier retouchings and recovered the original paint as far as possible. The small scenes, long covered by later furnishings and largely unseen until the middle of the nineteenth century, are today legible enough to allow close reading of their gestures and details. What survives is the earliest dated representation of the Stigmatization in panel painting. It is a decisive document for the iconography of an episode that would become, in the course of the century, the defining image of the saint.

The Sermon to the Birds (middle left)

The second scene of the left column is the second of the three episodes on the panel drawn from the saint’s life. Three friars in dark habits stand together on the left, in front of a tower with a green roof; on the right rises a tall, rounded form, pale against the gold, on which numerous small birds are ranged in regular, almost heraldic rows. Between the group of friars and the birds Bonaventura leaves a clear interval of gold. The Ministry catalogue entry reads this space as an expressive element, the distance across which the saint’s words travel. The scene is perhaps the most immediately appealing on the panel, and it has become one of the best known images of the early Franciscan legend.

The episode is told in Book I of the Vita prima. Celano places it near Bevagna, in the Umbrian valley. There Francis, seeing a great multitude of birds of different kinds, went towards them; they did not flee, and he preached to them, exhorting them to praise their Creator, before blessing them with the sign of the cross. In Celano’s narrative the companions are present and witness the event, and Bonaventura’s group of three friars reflects that circumstance. Neither the text nor the painting supplies any landscape detail beyond what is strictly necessary. The tree-hill, with its stylised foliage and rows of birds, is an emblem of the place rather than a description of it.

The formal treatment of the birds is remarkable. Rather than scattering them freely, Bonaventura aligns them in parallel rows across the hill, each bird turned in the same direction, so that the flock becomes an ordered congregation. The Ministry catalogue entry describes them as schematically arranged in parallel lines. This ordering echoes the attentive stillness that Celano describes, with the birds stretching their necks and remaining in place until blessed. The pictorial solution thus translates a narrative quality, the obedience of creatures to the saint’s word, into a principle of composition, and the repetition of identical small forms produces an effect close to ornament.

The three friars are treated as a compact block, their dark habits forming a single mass against the architecture. Their frontal or near-frontal stance, closer to that of the central figure than to the kneeling profile of the Stigmatization, gives the scene a solemn, almost liturgical character. This restraint does not diminish the narrative. The movement of the episode is carried by the axis between friars and birds, and by the empty interval that separates and connects them. The sober gestures and minutely described details the catalogue notes are entirely in keeping with the austere elegance the critical literature has long recognised in the panel.

The scene places Pescia at the head of a long iconographic tradition. The Sermon to the Birds recurs on the Bardi dossal in Santa Croce and on later panels, before receiving its most famous form in the frescoes of the Upper Church at Assisi. In 1235, however, the image was still in formation, and Bonaventura had, as a 1976 study of the panel’s ornament observed, no fixed tradition to follow for a saint dead only nine years. The Pescia scene is therefore not a variant of an established type. It is one of the earliest surviving attempts to give pictorial shape to an episode that would come to stand for the whole Franciscan relationship with creation.

The Healing of the Girl with the Twisted Neck (lower left)

With the third scene of the left column the panel passes from the life of Francis to his posthumous miracles, of which this is the first of three on the panel; the other two are at the lower right. A group of figures, women prominent among them, approaches from the left, beside a tall building with an arched entrance. At the centre stands an altar or tomb chest draped in red and covered with a white cloth decorated with a fine geometric pattern. It is sheltered by an arcade crowned with a small green dome, and friars stand behind it. The architecture defines a sacred interior, the church in which the saint’s body lies, and the composition directs the eye from the approaching group towards the tomb, the goal of the pilgrimage and the source of the miracle.

The episode belongs to the miracles recorded in Book III of the Vita prima. There Celano tells of a girl whose neck was so deformed that her head was bent down onto her shoulder, and who was healed when her mother brought her to the saint’s tomb and laid her there. The girl rose up restored. Book III collects the miracles of the dossier of sanctity assembled for the canonisation of 1228 under Gregory IX⁶, and the presence of three such miracles at Pescia suggests that the painter, or the friars who commissioned the panel, drew on that dossier.

The choice of a healing at the tomb carries a precise meaning. In the canonisation proceedings, as in the medieval cult of saints in general, miracles worked through contact with the saint’s body or burial place were the decisive proof of sanctity. By devoting half of its scenes to such miracles, the panel presents Francis not only as the saint of the stigmata and of the preaching but as a thaumaturge, a saint whose power continues to act after death through his relics.

The tomb is represented as an altar. The red-draped chest with its white patterned frontal is a liturgical object as much as a sepulchre, and the friars standing behind it suggest the custody of the shrine by the brethren. This assimilation of tomb and altar is significant in an object that was itself, in all probability, made to stand on an altar. The faithful praying before the panel could see in the small scene a mirror of their own situation, approaching the saint in the hope of grace. The panel thus doubles the devotional act it serves.

The figures of the women display the delicacy of colour and line that the critical literature has noted in the small scenes. Red, green and white garments are set side by side against the pale architecture, and the drapery is described with fine, rippling lines. The older dictionary entry spoke of the greater freedom of language in the six small scenes compared with the rigid stylisation of the central figure. This scene illustrates that contrast clearly, since the narrative register allows Bonaventura a lightness and variety of colour that the iconic image of the saint does not.

The architecture of this scene is also among those on which a 1976 study observed palmette scroll ornament of markedly Byzantine structure. That study traced the motif to sources such as the church of Saint Panteleimon at Nerezi, built in 1164. It also suggested, with due caution, that the supple form of Bonaventura’s palmettes might reflect familiarity with ancient Greek ornament seen in Lucca. These decorative details, easily overlooked at first sight, situate the scene within the classicising culture of the Lucchese and Pisan building sites. Bonaventura’s own documented work for the Lucca cathedral canonry, the 1244 contract for painting birds and other motifs, belonged to that same milieu.

The Foundation of the Third Order (upper right)

The right column opens with the scene most crowded with figures. At the left a canopy with a blue-green arched roof and white curtains drawn back shelters an altar draped in red, with a white patterned frontal; the national catalogue lists a book, a chalice, a jug, a table and a tent among the objects of the scene. Behind the altar stand three friars, and the central one, distinguished by his halo, is Francis. In front of the altar four young laymen kneel in coloured garments, and Francis leans towards them. On the right three men stand in red and green garments and caps, beneath a tower that closes the composition against the gold ground. The scene is organised as a progression from the right, where the standing men keep apart, through the kneeling youths, to the altar enclosure at the left.

The national catalogue identifies the scene as the foundation of the Third Order and calls it the only one of the six that recalls the saint’s relationship with the institution of the Church (0900077310-5). That is the identification followed here. It rests on the catalogue’s reading of the image: the panel carries no inscription beside the scene, and the part of the catalogue entry consulted for this essay does not name a written source.

The canopy is a carefully observed structure. Its arched roof, the drawn white curtains and the altar beneath evoke a ciborium or a shrine enclosure. The curtains have a precise function, since in medieval churches veils were drawn back to reveal the sacred object at moments of devotion, and their opening here may be read as a pictorial sign of revelation. The motif recurs in the possessed scene at the bottom of the same column, which shares the canopy and is thereby tied to this one.

The kneeling laymen are individually distinguished by colour and attitude: the first, in blue-green, leans forward with his hands extended towards the saint, while the others, in red and pale green, kneel behind him in a close row. Their youth and their lay dress set them apart from the friars behind the altar, and the three standing men, in caps and long garments, stay outside the group at the altar. Whether these men are meant as witnesses or as laymen not yet admitted the image does not say.

The architecture again includes the palmette ornament noted on four of the scenes by the 1976 study. The blue-green canopy roof is one of the most vivid passages of colour on the panel, and it shows the range of the painter’s palette within the narrow compass of the narrative fields. Caleca placed the panel within the Byzantine and Sicilian-Byzantine culture that formed the basis of the workshop’s language, and the small scenes, more than the central figure, show how that inheritance could be put to the service of lively storytelling. The dense, articulated composition of this scene shows that the Lucchese painter was capable of organising complex groups with clarity.

The Healing of Bartholomew of Narni (middle right)

The central scene of the right column is a posthumous miracle in which Francis himself appears as an actor. Against a large fortified building with towers and walls of red and white masonry, a half-naked man sits on the left, his legs immersed in a pool of green water rendered with wavy parallel lines. Francis, distinguished by his halo and dark habit, bends towards him and touches the afflicted limb. On the right a standing figure with a staff observes the scene. The composition is the most intimate of the six. It reduces the miracle to the encounter between the saint and the sick man, with a single witness and a monumental architectural backdrop.

The episode belongs to the canonisation miracles of Book III of Celano’s Vita prima, concerning a paralysed man of Narni named Bartholomew. In Celano’s account the saint appeared to him and directed him to a place of water, where his withered leg was healed. The water in the painting, presented as a pool or basin, follows this narrative element. The appearance of Francis in person, bending to touch the leg, gives visual form to the saint’s intervention after death, which was the central claim of the miracle. It is a posthumous miracle, but one in which the saint is shown acting as he did in life.

The composition has been compared to the iconography of Christ washing the apostles’ feet. The schema is close: a seated figure with bare legs, a standing figure bending forward towards them, and a basin of water between. The same schema appears in representations of the works of mercy to illustrate the visiting of the sick. If the borrowing is intentional, it carries a meaning beyond the narrative. It assimilates Francis to Christ, the theme that runs through the whole panel, from the stigmata to the Pantokrator-like frontality of the central figure. The healing then becomes an act of humility and service on the model of the Last Supper, rather than a demonstration of power.

The treatment of the water is one of the most inventive passages of the panel. Bonaventura renders the pool with closely set undulating lines in shades of green, creating a pattern that is at once descriptive and ornamental. This linear abstraction belongs to the same vocabulary as the faceted rocks of the Stigmatization and the ordered birds of the Sermon, and it typifies the panel’s way of turning natural phenomena into surface pattern. The half-naked body of the sick man, modelled with restraint, is one of the very few nude or partly nude figures on the panel, and its pale tones stand out against the green.

The fortified building that fills the background is the most imposing architectural motif of the right column. With its towers and walls in alternating bands of colour, it suggests a city, perhaps Narni itself, though the painter makes no attempt at topographical accuracy. As in the other scenes, the architecture frames and dignifies the action rather than locating it precisely. Its massive presence also balances the figures, which occupy only the lower part of the field.

Taken together with the other posthumous miracles, the Bartholomew scene confirms the panel’s reliance on Celano’s Vita prima, the earliest stage of the Franciscan legend, which the Legenda maior of 1263 was to replace. In this light the Pescia scene is a precious witness. It preserves an episode of the dossier of 1228 in a form that may draw on one of the most charged models of Christian iconography.

The Deliverance of the Possessed (lower right)

The scene that closes the right column, and the cycle, returns to the tomb under its canopy, now flanked by figures on both sides. At the left a friar stands; at the centre the altar-tomb with its red drapery and patterned frontal stands beneath the blue-green arched canopy with drawn curtains, with friars behind; on the right a group of figures in pale and red garments, women among them, faces the tomb. Small dark demons issue from the mouths of the possessed, the conventional medieval sign of exorcism. The composition answers both the Third Order scene at the top of the column, with which it shares the canopy, and the altar scene of the girl at the lower left. Through this echo the three scenes set at an altar tie the panel’s narrative together.

The national catalogue identifies the scene as the deliverance of the possessed. Celano’s Book III records several such deliverances, among them that of Peter of Foligno, who had become possessed in the course of a pilgrimage and was freed at the saint’s tomb, and that of women of Narni. Which of these cases the painter meant, if any, is not stated, and the scene may combine them in a single image of collective deliverance.

The demons leaving the mouths are rendered as small winged black creatures. This vocabulary was widespread in medieval exorcism scenes and drew ultimately on the Gospel narratives of Christ casting out demons. The analogy is again meaningful. As in the healing of Bartholomew, the saint’s posthumous action repeats a work of Christ, and the panel builds, scene by scene, the image of Francis as an alter Christus. A recent study of the female demoniac in thirteenth-century Franciscan art has observed that the exorcism scenes on these early panels are harder to match exactly with the written sources than the healings. This is a reminder that painters did not simply illustrate texts but also drew on established visual formulae.

The presence of women among the possessed deserves note. Women appear on this panel in only two scenes, the healing of the girl and this deliverance. In both they come to the tomb as suppliants, as mothers or as afflicted. Their prominence in the healing miracles reflects the composition of the pilgrim crowds at saints’ shrines as recorded in miracle collections. It also gives the panel’s narrative a social breadth that the episodes of the saint’s life lack: they show Francis with his brethren and, in the Third Order scene, with laymen only.

Compositionally, the scene is carefully balanced. The friar at the left and the group at the right flank the central canopy almost symmetrically, and the friars behind the altar mark the axis. This symmetry contrasts with the progression from right to left of the Third Order scene above, so that the right column develops through variation rather than repetition. The blue-green of the canopy, the red of the altar cloth and the pale robes of the possessed create a chromatic harmony that closes the cycle with notable calm, despite the violence of the subject.

As the final scene of the cycle, the deliverance of the possessed sums up the panel’s presentation of the saint. Francis appears here as the custodian of his tomb and of his community, through whose relics the forces of evil are expelled. Read together, the six scenes set three episodes of his life, the stigmata, the preaching to creation and the founding of the Third Order, beside three of his power after death, to heal a child and a sick man and to free the possessed. The whole conception reflects the official image of the saint at the moment of his canonisation. Painted in 1235, only seven years after that event, this sequence makes the Pescia panel the earliest surviving dated document of the visual construction of Franciscan sanctity.

Byzantine idiom, ornament and the Lucchese tradition

The stylistic character of the panel has been described with remarkable consistency, even if its evaluation has varied. Caleca placed the Pescia Saint Francis within the koinè formed in the Berlinghieri workshop from the late activity of its founder, a koinè that then spread widely in Tuscany. He saw it as drawing broadly, especially in the small lateral scenes, on Byzantine and Sicilian-Byzantine culture, which constituted the basis of the language of both Berlinghiero and Bonaventura. He also noted, with characteristic economy, the panel’s “undoubted, if contested, quality”, referring to a famous mid-century judgement on the Duecento that had treated much of this painting as repetitive and provincial. The older dictionary entry on Berlinghiero offered a similarly balanced verdict on the whole family. After the long devaluation of medieval art, it observed, the rediscovery of the “primitives” had given the painting of Berlinghiero and his son Bonaventura a prominence perhaps exaggerated relative to its merits, which a more recent critical re-examination had scaled down. Such judgements are themselves historical documents, reflecting the oscillations of modern taste between enthusiasm for the primitive and impatience with the conventional.

The relationship of the narrative scenes to Byzantine models has been discussed for decades. An older survey of Byzantine painting had already noted the link between the lateral episodes and Byzantine miniature painting, and an article published in 2000 in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz on Eastern models in thirteenth-century Italian panel painting set the relationship on firmer ground. The arrangement of the panel, with a central standing figure surrounded by narrative scenes, has itself been derived from the Byzantine vita icon, the hagiographic icon in which a saint is surrounded by episodes of his life. The Pescia panel, however, departs from this model in its arrangement: the scenes are set in two columns on either side of the standing figure, in open fields, and not in a frame of horizontal bands.

The most original contribution to the study of the panel’s ornament came from the brief study of 1976 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes already mentioned. Its author had gone to Pescia to see the panel and noticed that the stage properties of four of the narrative scenes, buildings and a curtain, are decorated with “beautiful palmette scrolls which do not appear to have attracted the attention of students of Tuscan painting”. What first struck him was their “pronounced Greek physiognomy”, recalling Greek vase painting. He then traced the structure of the motif to Byzantine sources: the friezes adorned with scrolls on buildings in the Paris Psalter and in the Psalter of Queen Melisende, and above all the sculptured archivolts framing the images of saints in the church of Saint Panteleimon at Nerezi, built in 1164, where a palmette scroll turns and returns to fill the available space.

There could be no doubt, he concluded, that Bonaventura derived his basic schema from examples of this kind. And yet the shape of his palmettes, with leaves more rounded and supple and scrolls swinging more freely, seemed to him to suggest an acquaintance with the original Greek version. A mason of early thirteenth-century Lucca, accustomed to looking at ancient marbles, would hardly have been surprised to see a painter deriving inspiration from a fragment of an ancient vase. The argument was offered as a suggestion, not a demonstration, and it should be presented as such. Its virtue is to place the panel within the classicising culture of Pisan and Lucchese stone-carving that has sometimes been called a “proto-Renaissance”. The same study noted later echoes of the motif on the Bardi panel in Santa Croce and on the footstool of a Florentine Madonna in Santa Maria Maggiore, an observation that points to the circulation of the Pescia repertory among later painters.

The question of the panel’s relationship to the father’s late work is equally significant. Caleca dated the Fucecchio cross to the extreme years of Berlinghiero’s life, shortly before his death, which the documents place before 1236, partly on the basis of its comparison with the Pescia panel. This means that father and son were producing closely related works at almost the same moment, and that the son’s signed panel is one of the instruments by which the father’s late chronology is established. The circularity is not vicious, since the father’s death date is independently fixed by the documents, but it illustrates how tightly the activity of the two men was interwoven. The style of the panel is thus best described not as the personal manner of a gifted individual set against a conservative tradition, but as one articulation of a shared workshop language. That language was rooted in the Byzantinising milieu of Pisa and Volterra. In 1235 it had to be adapted to a novel task: representing a saint who had died only nine years before, for whose figure and legend there was, as the 1976 study remarked, “no fixed tradition”.

The dossal in time: the first decades of Franciscan images

The Pescia panel is often described as the earliest surviving painting of Francis. This claim requires precision. The national catalogue calls it “the oldest painting representing the friar of Assisi”, and the organisers of the 2026 exhibition in Pescia speak of “the oldest painting to have come down to us depicting the Saint”. A fresco of Francis in the Benedictine⁷ monastery of Subiaco, without halo or stigmata, is sometimes held to be an earlier image of him; that claim has not been checked for this essay. What can be said is that the Pescia panel is the oldest surviving dated panel painting of Francis that this essay knows, and the oldest surviving painted narrative of his life and miracles in the same terms, whatever may be the order of images in other media.

It may not have been the first panel of its type. A panel with Saint Francis and stories, dated 1228, is reported at San Miniato al Tedesco and now lost, known only from a later record; its date, its record and any attribution to Bonaventura could not be checked for this essay, and it cannot count against the claim made for Pescia. The Yale University Art Gallery’s panels discussed below, from the convent of San Francesco at San Miniato al Tedesco, are a separate matter.

The shape of the hood worn by the saint, round or pointed, was an argument in disputes between branches of the Order in the early modern period; the details of that dispute are not documented in the sources consulted for this essay.

After Pescia, gabled panels of Francis with stories continue through the middle decades of the century: the panel of the Bardi chapel in Santa Croce, dated c. 1245–1250 in the entry on its master, the panel in the Museo Civico of Pistoia, described in the entry on the Master of Santa Maria Primerana, and the panel in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa. Each should be examined on its own, as an independent account of the saint.

The Pisa panel deserves particular attention because of a recurring chronological claim. The panel measures 155 by 132.3 centimetres according to the national catalogue. It probably stood originally on the high altar of the Franciscan church in Pisa, and a sermon of Archbishop Federico Visconti⁸ seems to allude to it as early as 1264. Its attribution has oscillated between Giunta Pisano and his followers.

In the 1970s one critic attributed to Giunta both the Pisa panel and the rectangular panels in the Treasury of the Basilica of Assisi and in the Vatican Pinacoteca, and dated the Pisa panel before 1235, which would have made it earlier than Pescia. Caleca objected in 1987 that an attribution to Giunta was impossible for chronological reasons, since the miracles represented became public knowledge only around 1250. The national catalogue now dates the panel between 1240 and 1260 and attributes it to Giunta with a qualifying “attributed”. The early dating of the Pisa panel before Pescia remains, therefore, an unconfirmed opinion, and the claim that Pescia is the earliest surviving dated panel of the type is not threatened by it.

A rectangular type of dossal also existed. The dossal with Francis and four posthumous miracles in the Museo del Tesoro at Assisi, dated 1250–1260 in the entry on Giunta Pisano, and the closely related one in the Vatican Pinacoteca have a low, wide format that differs from the gabled one of Pescia. The two types share the miracles at the tomb; they differ in format and, perhaps, in their relationship to the altar. It is within this landscape of competing formats that the Pescia panel must be situated: not as the origin of a single tradition, but as the earliest surviving dated witness of a moment in which several solutions were being tried.

The afterlife of the panel: hood, halo, coverings, misattribution and restorations

The history of the Pescia panel after the thirteenth century is a history of concealment and rediscovery. Its original destination is uncertain. The national catalogue reports a local historiographical tradition: the panel was acquired on the Florentine market by the Mainardi family and placed on the third altar on the right by Matteo Mainardi in 1494.

The local tradition is not a document, and it does not settle the original destination of the panel. Caleca’s formula, that the panel was preserved “ab antiquo” in the church of San Francesco in Pescia, is as far as the evidence allows one to go.

Between 1564 and 1577 the church was renewed and new altars were erected, and a canvas commissioned from the painter Alessandro Bardelli was placed in front of the old panel. According to the national catalogue, the painting did not entirely cover the effigy of Saint Francis but, leaving the face visible, exalted his virtues with the representation of Mansuetude and Faith.

An inscription on a slab on the altar frontal records that in 1614 the only object recovered from the old furnishings was the panel with the ancient effigy of the saint. For centuries, then, the faithful of Pescia saw only the face of the medieval saint, framed within a later painting.

The hood and the halo have their own history. In the panel as reproduced a pointed hood projects beside the saint’s head; the national catalogue records only that the restoration of 1981–82 removed all earlier retouchings, and the details of earlier alterations of the hood at Pescia are not documented in the sources consulted here. If the hood was altered in the controversy mentioned above, the panel is a material trace of it.

The panel’s attribution followed a similarly tortuous path. Until 1851 it was unanimously assigned, according to the national catalogue, to Margaritone d’Arezzo, although an anonymous manuscript of the early eighteenth century, found in the municipal library of Pescia, had correctly ascribed it to Bonaventura Berlinghieri. The attribution to Margaritone is understandable, since that Aretine painter and his workshop produced numerous devotional panels with the solitary figure of Francis; but it was wrong. In 1851 two connoisseurs noticed the existence of the lateral stories.

On that occasion the Lucchese painter and antiquarian Michele Ridolfi obtained permission to remove temporarily the canvas covering the panel and, through the inscription, could assign the work to Bonaventura. Caleca cites the publication of this discovery in the proceedings of the Lucchese Academy of 1857. Decades earlier, the eighteenth-century Modenese literary historian Girolamo Tiraboschi had already mentioned a panel by Bonaventura, and Caleca read his notice as referring to copies of the Pescia panel at Guiglia and in the Vatican palace. The painter’s name was thus known in print long before 1851, but the Pescia original remained hidden.

The twentieth century brought a sequence of restorations. In 1910 it was decided to make the panel entirely visible, and a restorer was commissioned to carry out an intervention that concerned mainly the consolidation of flaking paint. The intervention was not decisive: a photograph of around 1920 in the photographic archive of the Florentine Soprintendenza shows the panel again in precarious condition. Probably on the occasion of the seventh centenary of the saint’s death, in 1926, the panel was restored again, since a photograph of that year shows it in good condition. The most important intervention was that of the Florentine restorer Alfio del Serra, between 19 November 1981 and 3 October 1982, financed by the Cassa di Risparmio di Pistoia e Pescia. On that occasion, according to the national catalogue, all previous retouchings were removed and the colours and original parts recovered as far as possible.

The most recent chapter belongs to our own decade. In 2023 the diocese of Pescia lent the panel to the Diözesanmuseum of Freising, the diocesan museum of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising. It was presented as one of the most prominent works in an exhibition devoted to Francis, held from 7 October 2023 to 7 January 2024. Before its departure the panel underwent diagnostic investigations by restorers in collaboration with the Soprintendenza, which established that it could travel. It was returned to the church of San Francesco in Pescia on 29 January 2024. The diocese announced a conservation intervention for the following months, made possible by the Munich museum. It was to consist of the revision and adhesion of micro-losses and of disinfestation from woodworm by the anoxic method. A local news report mentioned micro-detachments of colour that had occurred during the transfer. The details of the completed intervention, if it has taken place, have not been published in sources available to this essay.

In the autumn of 2026, the eight-hundredth anniversary of Francis’s death, the panel has become the point of departure for an exhibition, “Santo Francesco – 800 anni di presenza”, organised by the Fondazione POMA Liberatutti, whose premises face the church across the piazza. Press accounts give the programme as running from 2 October to 6 December 2026. A lecture on the saint was delivered in the church on the evening of 2 October, the exhibition itself opened on 3 October, and guided visits to the panel take place every Saturday.

The panel itself has not been moved. The exhibition is set out on two floors of the foundation. It places the panel in dialogue with the preparatory cartoons made by the painter Romano Stefanelli for frescoes in the Sacro Convento of Assisi and with the work of four contemporary photographers. It also includes a selection of photographic enlargements of the 1235 panel, which allow visitors to approach details hard to perceive at first sight. The panel thus remains where it has been for centuries, on its altar, while the exhibition invites the public to cross the square to see it.

Attribution debates and the workshop question

Around the Pescia panel a substantial corpus of works has been assembled over a century and a half, and the history of this corpus is a lesson in the hazards of connoisseurship founded on a single fixed point. Caleca’s judgement of 1992 deserves to be restated in full: around the panel a large corpus of works had formed which, “in the present state of studies, can hardly be attributed” to Bonaventura. The discovery of the Fucecchio signature, he argued, made it plausible that from the late activity of the head of the workshop a koinè had formed in the Berlinghieri shop that then spread widely in Tuscany. Within that koinè the Pescia panel must be placed, rather than at the head of a personal oeuvre.

The lost works first. Tiraboschi reported a panel by Bonaventura in the church of Guiglia, a fief of the Montecuccoli family near Modena. The older dictionary entry treats it as a lost work painted by Bonaventura for that church, while Caleca regarded the panels at Guiglia and in the Vatican palace as copies of the Pescia panel. A recent study in the journal Medioevo Europeo adds that Tiraboschi did not see the Montecuccoli panel himself but cited an inscription reading

Bonaventura Berlinghieri me pinxit de Luca Anno 1235.

The divergence between “lost original” and “copy” cannot be settled without new evidence, and the Guiglia panel is best regarded as a lost witness of uncertain status that at least confirms the early diffusion of the Pescia composition.

Crucifixion with Scenes of the Passion

Christ on the Cross

The whole wing is organised around the cross, which runs from the upper edge almost to the lower frame and divides the field into four compartments. Christ hangs dead, his eyes closed, his haloed head sunk onto his right shoulder, and his body describes a pronounced curve to the side, so that the hips swing out from the axis of the cross while the legs return towards it. On either side of the head are the letters IC XC, the Greek abbreviation of the name of Jesus Christ. The cross itself is painted a deep blue, against which the pale flesh of the body stands out. Its arms reach the borders of the panel, so that the crucified body physically binds together the narrative scenes around it.

The image belongs to the type of the Christus patiens, the suffering and dead Christ. This type spread through Tuscan painting from the second quarter of the thirteenth century and replaced the older Christus triumphans, the living Christ with open eyes. The Byzantine-derived formula had been given its most influential Tuscan form by the Pisan painter Giunta, and Caleca saw Berlinghiero’s own late work, the Fucecchio cross, as already responding to the pathos of Giunta. The Uffizi wing shows that by the mid-century the Lucchese workshop tradition had fully absorbed the new image of the dead Christ. It is a sign of the shared religious sensibility, shaped in part by the Franciscans, that placed the humanity and suffering of Christ at the centre of devotion.

The anatomy of the body is constructed according to the conventions of the Byzantine tradition. The torso is divided into rounded, almost geometric sections, with the ribs and the abdomen marked by curved contours and modelled through subtle shading. The swelling of the belly and the sharp turn of the hips give the figure its characteristic sinuous outline. These are not observations from life but formulae of great expressive force. The curve of the body conveys the weight of death and the abandonment of the limbs, and the sagging posture invites the viewer to contemplate the cost of the sacrifice.

The loincloth is one of the most delicate passages of the painting. Dark and partly transparent, it falls in fine folds from the hips to the knees, allowing the forms of the thighs to show through. Such transparent loincloths, executed with thin glazes, belong to the refined vocabulary of Byzantine painting. Their appearance in a Lucchese panel testifies to the workshop’s close knowledge of Eastern models. The contrast between the dark cloth and the pale flesh heightens the luminosity of the body, which seems almost to glow against the blue cross and the gold ground.

The blood flowing from the wounds is shown with insistence. It drips from the nailed hands, flows from the wound in the side, and runs from the feet down the shaft of the cross to its base. There a rocky mound represents Golgotha, and in a small cavity within it lies a skull. This is the skull of Adam, buried according to tradition at the place of the crucifixion, whose sin is redeemed by the blood of Christ flowing onto him. The motif thus turns the base of the cross into a statement about the history of salvation. It links the first man and the new Adam in a single vertical axis running from the bowed head to the skull below.

Two angels fly near the arms of the cross, their bodies foreshortened in movement against the gold. They signal the cosmic significance of the event and introduce a note of celestial lament above the earthly mourners of the lower registers. Taken as a whole, the figure of Christ shows the qualities that have led part of the critical literature to link the diptych with the late activity of Bonaventura. These include the refinement of the line, the restrained elegance of the anatomy and the luminous handling of colour. Another part of the literature has seen the same qualities as the hand of a distinct painter, trained in the Berlinghieri tradition but active between Lucca and Florence. The image itself does not settle the question. It does show the high level reached by the Berlinghieresque language in the middle decades of the century.

The Mourners

The two upper compartments flanking the body of Christ are given over to the mourners, who stand on narrow ground lines beneath the arms of the cross. On the left a compact group of women in red mantles crowds around a central figure in a dark blue mantle. Her hand raised towards her face expresses her grief, and the companions seem to support her. On the right two figures stand apart: a woman in a deep blue mantle over a red dress and a young man in red and pink garments. The man turns towards the woman, and their gestures connect them with each other as much as with the cross.

The iconography combines two traditions of Crucifixion imagery. The pair on the right corresponds to the Virgin and Saint John, the two mourners who, according to the Gospel of John, stood beside the cross and to whom the dying Christ entrusted each other. The group of women on the left corresponds to the holy women who, according to the Gospels, followed Christ from Galilee and watched the crucifixion. Since the Virgin traditionally appears only once, the identification of the grieving central figure in the left group should be made with caution. She may be one of the Marys, perhaps Mary Magdalene, or the image may conflate the two traditions. The panel offers no inscriptions to resolve the point.

The painter treats the two groups as contrasting expressions of grief. On the left the emotion is collective and agitated, the women pressing together in a block of red. The central figure is enveloped in dark blue, and the overlapping heads create a sense of crowding and lament. On the right the emotion is restrained and dialogic. The two standing figures, separated by an interval of gold, turn towards each other with measured gestures, and their stillness conveys a meditative sorrow. The contrast enlivens the upper zone of the panel and matches the varied emotional tone of Byzantine Passion imagery.

The colour scheme binds the mourners to the whole panel. The deep blue of the mantles takes up the blue of the cross, while the reds and pinks of the garments answer the blood flowing from Christ’s wounds. Through this chromatic echo the mourners are drawn into the central image, as if their grief were tinged by the colour of the sacrifice. The drapery is modelled with fine, closely set highlights, in the manner of Byzantine painting, and the heavy mantles fall in long vertical folds that emphasise the figures’ height and solemnity.

The scale of the mourners is significant. They are much smaller than the crucified Christ, whose body occupies the full height of the panel. This hierarchy of scale is typical of medieval painting, in which size expresses importance rather than spatial position. The Crucifixion is thus at once a narrative scene and an iconic image. The mourners belong to the story, while the body of Christ is presented as an object of contemplation for the viewer, who is invited to share the grief of the figures beside the cross.

The emotional register of these figures places the panel within the devotional culture of the mid-thirteenth century, in which contemplation of the Passion and compassion for the sorrowing Virgin and holy women became central themes. The provenance of the diptych from a convent of Poor Clares in Lucca gives this emphasis particular significance. Images of grieving women beside the cross offered the nuns models of compassionate devotion. Saint Clare⁹ is present on the companion wing, and the diptych as a whole may be understood as an object made for female religious devotion. That reading rests on the provenance and iconography, not on any surviving documentation of the commission.

Christ on the Road to Calvary

The lower left compartment shows the procession to Calvary, the episode that immediately precedes the crucifixion. Christ, in a blue mantle, carries the dark cross on his shoulder, its arms rising diagonally above the heads of the group. He moves towards the right, in the direction of the central cross, and is accompanied by figures in red, among them soldiers in helmets. Behind him, on the left edge, stands a group of women in red and blue mantles. Their bowed heads and gestures echo the mourners above and connect the procession with the lament at the foot of the cross.

The episode rests on the Gospel accounts of Christ bearing his cross out of Jerusalem to Golgotha. In Luke’s account the women of Jerusalem followed him, lamenting, and Christ turned to address them. The group of women in the panel corresponds to this element of the narrative. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke also relate that a man named Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry the cross. Medieval imagery sometimes shows him and sometimes omits him in favour of Christ bearing the cross alone. In this compartment the cross rests on Christ’s own shoulder, and the identification of a specific Simon among the accompanying figures cannot be made with certainty from the image.

The compositional logic of the scene is directional. The movement from left to right, from the women through Christ to the soldiers, leads the eye towards the shaft of the central cross. The narrative therefore leads directly into the main image, and the lower register works as a prologue to the crucifixion that dominates the panel. The diagonal of the carried cross, set against the strict verticals of the figures, gives the small scene its energy. It also repeats in miniature the cruciform shape that organises the whole panel.

The figures are densely grouped, with overlapping heads and bodies creating a crowd within a very small space. The soldiers’ helmets and the red garments of the escort contrast with the blue of Christ’s mantle, which isolates him chromatically within the group and links him to the blue of the cross above. The women’s mantles repeat the colours of the mourners in the upper register. Through these correspondences the painter creates a coherent pictorial system in which colour carries meaning as well as decorating the surface.

The inclusion of the Way to Calvary and the Deposition on either side of the base of the cross arranges the episodes in a temporal sequence: before the crucifixion at the left, after it at the right. The crucified Christ stands at the centre as the culmination of the drama. This arrangement differs from the larger painted crosses of the period, in which the scenes of the Passion are placed in the apron beside the body of Christ, and it reflects the more compact format of a diptych wing. The narrative episodes surround the cross and frame its timeless presentation of the dead Christ with the before and after of history.

The scene is small, but it is executed with considerable care in the faces, armour and drapery. The quality of these details has contributed to the attribution debate, since the narrative scenes are where the critical literature has sought the closest comparisons with the small stories of the Pescia panel of 1235. Comparison with Pescia reveals a shared repertory of compact groups, gold grounds and clearly outlined figures. It also reveals the greater density and emotional intensity of the Uffizi scenes, which reflect a later stage of the Tuscan maniera greca. Whether this change marks the evolution of a single painter over twenty years or a different hand remains an open question.

The Deposition

The lower right compartment shows the Deposition, the episode that follows the death of Christ. A small dark cross rises in the compartment, and against it a ladder is set diagonally. A man, standing on the ladder, holds the limp body of Christ, which bends forward over his shoulder and arms. On the left a woman in a dark mantle, the Virgin, approaches the body and takes Christ’s dangling hand, bringing her face close to it. At the lower right a figure in red kneels and uses pincers to extract the nail from Christ’s feet; another figure stands behind on the right. The scene is crowded but legible, and each figure performs a distinct action.

The episode rests on the Gospel accounts of Joseph of Arimathea, who obtained the body of Christ from Pilate, and of Nicodemus, who, according to John, assisted him in the burial. Medieval imagery conventionally gives Joseph the task of supporting the body and Nicodemus that of extracting the nails. The Uffizi scene follows this convention: the man on the ladder can be identified as Joseph and the kneeling figure with the pincers as Nicodemus. The presence of the Virgin, which has no direct basis in the Gospel accounts of the deposition, reflects a devotional development of the Byzantine tradition, in which the mother’s encounter with the body of her son became one of the most moving moments of the Passion.

The gesture of the Virgin is the emotional centre of the scene. Taking the hand of the dead Christ and bringing it to her face, she anticipates the theme of the Lamentation and gives the deposition an intimate, maternal character. The motif derives from Byzantine Deposition imagery. Its appearance here testifies to the circulation of such models in Tuscan painting around the mid-century, through icons and illuminated manuscripts, and through the experience of painters who, like Bonaventura’s stepson Lupardo, travelled within the Mediterranean world. The panel offers no specific evidence of the route by which this formula reached its painter.

The body of Christ is the compositional hinge of the scene. Bending forward, limp and heavy, it forms a diagonal that answers the ladder and the slant of the cross arm. The painter renders its weight convincingly, showing the head and arms hanging down as Joseph takes the burden on his shoulder. In contrast with the stiff, iconic presentation of the crucified body in the main image, the deposed body is shown as a corpse being handled. The two images thus present the same body in two states, as an object of contemplation on the cross and as a dead man taken down for burial.

The ladder is a remarkable detail. Rendered with its rungs drawn in clear parallel lines, it creates a strong diagonal across the compartment, introducing a note of practical realism into the solemn scene. Such instruments, the ladder and the pincers, would later become the “instruments of the Passion”, objects of devotion in their own right. Their careful depiction here reflects the growing attention to the concrete details of Christ’s suffering and death that characterises thirteenth-century Passion imagery.

As the final episode of the narrative, the Deposition closes the sequence that runs from the Way to Calvary on the left, through the Crucifixion at the centre, to the taking down of the body on the right. For the nuns of Santa Chiara in Lucca, if the provenance indicates the original destination, the panel offered a complete meditation on the Passion. Its companion wing, with the Virgin and Child enthroned among saints including Clare and Francis, set the sacrifice of Christ beside the order’s own saints. Whether the painter was Bonaventura in his last documented decades, or a close collaborator known by convention as the Master of the Oblate Cross, the wing is one of the finest achievements of the Lucchese workshop tradition in the mid-thirteenth century.

Diptych with the Virgin and Child with Saints and the Crucifixion

Left wing: the Virgin and Child with Saints

The left wing is dominated by the half-length figure of the Virgin holding the Child, who occupies the upper two thirds of the field and fills it almost to its borders. Around this monumental group, and on a much smaller scale, stand eight saints: two in the upper corners, one at mid-height on the left, and five aligned in a frieze along the lower register. The Greek abbreviation MP ΘY, Mētēr Theou, “Mother of God”, flanks the Virgin’s head. The disproportion between the central group and the saints follows the hierarchy of medieval devotional painting, in which scale expresses dignity. The Virgin and Child appear as an icon, and the saints as intercessors gathered in attendance around it.

The Virgin and Child follow a Byzantine type of tenderness. The Child presses his cheek against his mother’s, while she supports him with one hand and inclines her head towards him; this is the type known in Greek as Eleousa, the Virgin of tenderness, or in its more intimate variant Glykophilousa, the “sweet-kissing” Virgin. The Child wears an orange-brown garment streaked with gold highlights, the chrysography reserved in Byzantine painting for divine figures. He holds a scroll, a sign of the Word. The Virgin’s deep blue mantle, edged with gold and drawn over her head, wraps both figures in a single ample silhouette. The Greek inscription and the iconographic type together show how closely the Lucchese workshop tradition followed Eastern models in the middle of the thirteenth century.

The faces show the refinement that has led part of the critical literature to place the diptych at the summit of the Berlinghieresque tradition. The Virgin’s face is pale and oval, with large almond eyes, a long thin nose and a small mouth. It is modelled with subtle transitions of tone, and a light rose flush on the cheeks animates the surface. The Child’s face, rounder and fuller, presses against hers so that the two profiles merge. The tenderness of the motif is conveyed less through movement than through this contact of surfaces. It offers the viewer an image of intimate affection within the solemn frame of the icon.

The saints in the upper zone frame the Virgin’s head. In the upper left corner stands an apostle in blue and pink, identified by the Uffizi as Peter; in the upper right corner stands John the Baptist, with long hair and a red mantle. Below Peter, on the left, a small figure in a black habit with a white wimple can be identified as Saint Clare. Her presence is decisive both for the destination and for the dating of the diptych: Clare was canonised in 1255, and the panel comes from a convent of Poor Clares in Lucca. The nuns thus saw the founder of their order standing in the immediate presence of the Mother of God, at a moment when her cult had only just been officially sanctioned.

The lower register aligns five standing figures, identified by the Uffizi as Andrew, Anthony of Padua, Michael, Francis and James. Two of them are Franciscan friars in dark habits, holding books and raising a hand. The Uffizi’s identifications name these two as Francis and Anthony of Padua, the latter canonised in 1232. The small inscriptions above the figures, only partly legible in reproduction, are the basis of these identifications. At the centre of the row stands the Archangel Michael in the jewelled costume of the Byzantine imperial court, the loros, holding an orb and a staff. A dragon writhes at his feet. Apostles, founders of the Franciscan movement and the archangel together form a hierarchy of intercessors that reflects the devotion of the community for which the diptych was made.

The figure of Michael deserves particular comment. Presented frontally, wings spread and robed in imperial splendour, he is at once the commander of the heavenly hosts, the victor over the dragon of the Apocalypse and the psychopomp who weighs and guides souls. His central position in the lower register, directly beneath the Virgin and Child, gives him the role of guardian and defender of the community. The jewelled loros, with its gold and red ornament, introduces an element of Byzantine courtly splendour into the otherwise sober company of apostles and friars. It is one of the most brilliant passages of colour on the panel.

As a whole, the left wing presents the Franciscan family in the immediate presence of the Mother of God. Francis, Clare and Anthony stand alongside the apostles and the Baptist, as if the new saints of the thirteenth century already belonged to the ancient court of heaven. For the nuns of Santa Chiara this image affirmed the sanctity of their own founders. It also offered a model of devotion centred on the tender humanity of the Virgin and Child. The deliberate echo between the blue of the Virgin’s mantle on the left wing and the blue of the cross on the right wing ties the two halves of the diptych into a single programme.

Right wing: the Crucifixion with Scenes of the Passion

The right wing is organised around the dark blue cross, which runs almost the full height of the panel and divides it into four compartments, two above and two below the arms. The dead Christ hangs at the centre, head bowed onto his right shoulder, eyes closed, body curving sideways from the axis of the cross. The letters IC XC flank his head, and two angels fly near his hands. In the upper compartments the mourners stand. On the left is a group of holy women around a grieving figure in dark blue; on the right a woman in blue and a young man in pink, conventionally the Virgin and Saint John, face each other. In the lower compartments the narrative unfolds before and after the Crucifixion, with the Way to Calvary on the left and the Deposition on the right.

The figure of Christ belongs to the type of the Christus patiens, which had replaced the living, triumphant Christ in Tuscan painting from the second quarter of the century. The Pisan painter Giunta had given the type its most influential form, and Caleca saw Berlinghiero’s late Fucecchio cross already responding to his pathos. In the Uffizi wing the type is fully developed. The anatomy is built from rounded, almost geometric sections, the dark transparent loincloth reveals the forms beneath it, and the pronounced curve of the body conveys the weight of death. Blood flows from the hands, the side and the feet down the shaft of the cross to the rock of Golgotha. There, in a small cavity, lies the skull of Adam, a reminder that the death of Christ redeems the sin of the first man.

The mourners translate the grief of the Crucifixion into two contrasting modes. On the left the holy women press together in a dense block of red around the central figure wrapped in blue, who raises a hand to her face in lament. On the right the two standing figures, separated by an interval of gold, turn towards each other with measured gestures. Their stillness expresses a contained, meditative sorrow, recalling the Gospel episode in which the dying Christ entrusted his mother and the beloved disciple to each other. Since the panel bears no inscriptions identifying the figures, the identity of the grieving woman in the left group should be stated with caution. The image may conflate the swooning Virgin with the holy women of the Gospel accounts.

The lower register turns the iconic image into a narrative sequence. On the left Christ, in a blue mantle, carries his cross towards the right, escorted by helmeted soldiers and figures in red and followed by grieving women. On the right Joseph of Arimathea, standing on a ladder, lowers the limp body. The Virgin takes her son’s dangling hand and brings it to her face, while Nicodemus kneels to draw the nail from the feet with pincers. The temporal order runs from left to right: before the Crucifixion, the Crucifixion itself, and its aftermath. The central cross thus stands as the culmination of a story told around it.

Colour binds the wing into a coherent system. The deep blue of the cross recurs in the mantles of the Virgin, of the women and of Christ carrying the cross. The reds of the garments take up the blood that runs from the wounds, and the gold ground isolates each figure against an undifferentiated sacred space. The dark ornamented border frames the whole, as it does on the left wing, so that when the diptych was opened the two panels would have read as a pair. The correspondence of format, border and palette shows that the two wings were conceived together and not merely assembled.

The relationship between the two wings is theological as well as formal. On the left the Virgin holds the living Child cheek to cheek; on the right the same Christ hangs dead on the cross, and in the Deposition his mother again brings her face close to his body. The diptych thus juxtaposes the Incarnation and the Passion, the tenderness of the infancy and the grief of the sacrifice. This pairing belongs to the devotion to the humanity of Christ that Franciscan spirituality encouraged. For a community of Poor Clares, the diptych offered a complete meditation on the mystery of Christ, to be opened and contemplated in private devotion.

The quality of the right wing has played an important part in the attribution debate. Its narrative scenes have been compared with the small stories of the Pescia panel of 1235, the only securely documented work of Bonaventura. They share the compact groups, the gold grounds and the clearly outlined figures, but the Uffizi scenes are denser and more intense. This reflects a later phase of the Tuscan maniera greca, roughly twenty years after Pescia. Whether the difference marks the evolution of the same painter or the hand of a close associate active between Lucca and Florence is still disputed. Caleca’s reading of the Oblate Master’s group as evidence of a Berlinghieresque painter working in both cities remains a fruitful framework. Either way, the wing ranks among the finest achievements of the Lucchese workshop tradition in the mid-thirteenth century.

Crucifix (Triumphant Christ)

The painted crucifix attributed to the circle of Bonaventura Berlinghieri, now in the National Gallery of Ancient Art at Palazzo Barberini, is a large wooden cross painted in tempera that exemplifies in a paradigmatic way the model of the Christus triumphans of the Byzantine tradition, which was still very much alive in Tuscany and central Italy in the mid-13th century. The figure of Christ, of monumental size, is depicted alive, upright, and steadfast on the cross, with his body facing forward, slightly inclined, his eyes open and his gaze fixed, emphasizing the victorious and regal dimension of the Redeemer who dominates death and has not yet suffered its dramatic effects. The body is elongated according to strongly Byzantine canons, with modeling achieved more through the juxtaposition of chromatic planes than through true naturalistic chiaroscuro, and the loincloth is stylized in calligraphic folds that accentuate the figure’s hieratic abstraction.

Christ’s head, slightly tilted but not slumped, features sharp features, a long, straight nose, a forked beard, and hair arranged in regular locks, following an iconic type that directly references the Byzantine models widespread in Lucca and the Tyrrhenian area. The face does not express acute suffering, but a grave, almost solemn serenity that reaffirms the scene’s theological character: not the moment of human suffering, but the glorious manifestation of the crucified and already triumphant Savior. The hands, pierced by nails but open in an almost blessing gesture, extend the spatiality of the composition along the horizontal arm of the cross, creating a sort of symbolic embrace toward the viewer, while the feet, also nailed, are rendered with the customary linear schematism of the Lucca workshop.

The background is gilded, in accordance with the custom of painted crosses of the time, and constructs a completely abstract, liturgical space, where the earthly sky is replaced by a metaphysical light that envelops the sacred figure. The gilding, likely originally enriched with embossing and engravings that are now partially worn, serves as a neutral field that highlights the dark, sharp outline of the body, accentuating its almost iconic presence on the altar. The color scheme, based on a range of reds, deep blues, and enameled greens, reflects that “precious chromatic enamel” traditionally associated with the Berlinghieri tradition, with tonal transitions that are drier rather than soft, typical of Byzantine-influenced painting in the Tuscan region during the first half of the 13th century.

In the lateral fields beside the body, as in the contemporary crosses of Lucca and Fucecchio, the Virgin and St. John the Evangelist stand at full length, each above a small compartment. Mary, veiled and wrapped in the maphorion, is depicted in a composed yet engaged pose, with a hand gesture pointing to her Son or emphasizing his sacrifice, while John displays the typical expression of restrained grief, with his head slightly bowed and his hands sometimes at his chest, in a codified yet effective gesture. These side figures, while remaining stylized, introduce a first, subtle note of narrative pathos that serves as a counterpoint to the solemn centrality of the triumphant Christ, foreshadowing the subsequent dramatic emphases that the Giunta and later Giotto traditions would develop in the type of Christus patiens.

At the top of the cross is painted the clipeus of the Blessing Christ or the Redeemer Christ within a circular medallion, seated or in half-length, often flanked by adoring angels. This element underscores the continuity between earthly sacrifice and heavenly glory, creating a vertical axis that leads the eye from the space of Golgotha to the vision of Christ in majesty, according to a unified theological program that the wooden surface translates into hierarchically ordered images. At the ends of the cross and along the shaft, small panels may appear depicting episodes from the Passion or the symbols of the four evangelists, which enrich the narrative and transform the cross into a sort of iconographic “summa” intended for liturgical contemplation.

From a stylistic point of view, the work displays all the characteristics of the Lucca workshop associated with Berlinghiero and his sons: strongly marked linearism, the use of color as precious enamel rather than for naturalistic rendering, elongated and frontal figures, slender faces with large, aligned eyes, and sharp, graphic outlines. The structure of the cross, with its slender proportions, lends the figure of Christ a decisive verticality, accentuated by the rhythm of the folds of the loincloth and the fall of the hair along the neck, so that the entire composition appears as a powerful sign within the church’s liturgical space. The anatomical rendering is merely suggested, almost abstract, and subordinate to the symbolic function: the body is not studied as a natural organism, but as a sacred surface upon which the painter traces the theological design of sacrifice and victory.

As for the dating, the cross in Palazzo Barberini is generally placed between 1250 and 1260, a period in which the Byzantine-influenced Lucca tradition was still strong, yet the precursors of the new sensibility that would lead to the overcoming of the Christus triumphans are already discernible in certain expressive details and in the greater articulation of the figurative narrative. The relationship with the crosses signed or attributed to Berlinghiero (Lucca and Fucecchio) and with the work of Bonaventura Berlinghieri allows us to interpret this work as the mature outcome of a long process of developing Constantinopolitan models transplanted to Tuscany, filtered through Western devotion and the demands of mendicant preaching. Thus, the Barberini Cross stands today not only as an important document of 13th-century painting but as a visual testimony to the still-unfinished transition from a purely theophanic conception of the image to a progressive focus on the human and pathetic dimension of the Passion.

Crucifix (fragment: head and chest of Christ)

The Avignon fragment comes from a painted cross produced in Lucca around the middle of the thirteenth century. It preserves only the head and upper chest of Christ, the gilded halo, and a small strip of the blue ground of the cross at the right. The Petit Palais, in a page known for this essay only through a search snippet, records another element of the same cross, the left arm of Christ with Saint John, in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; that fragment is discussed below. Apart from it, the rest of the object, including the lateral fields with the mourners, the other terminals, the cimasa and the suppedaneum, is lost. The panel was evidently cut down at some point, probably to save the most venerable and best-preserved part of a damaged cross, the face of Christ. Such reduction was a common fate for large painted crosses whose original setting on a screen or triumphal arch disappeared with later remodelling of church interiors. What survives was valued as a devotional image in its own right, a Volto Santo in miniature.

The fragment shows extensive physical damage. Its edges are irregular, the wood is deeply riddled with worm holes, and broad areas around the halo and along the lower and left sides have lost their paint and ground, exposing the gesso and the bare panel. The outline of the surviving part follows the halo at the top, showing that the vertical upright of the cross above Christ’s head was sawn away along the curve of the nimbus. Despite these losses, the central part of the image is remarkably well preserved. The face, the hair, the neck and the chest keep their modelling and much of their original surface, which allows the style of the painting to be judged with some confidence.

The halo is not simply painted but built up in relief, a technique known as pastiglia, and covered with gold. Its outer edge forms a raised ridge, now largely broken, which once framed the head like a metal plate. Within the gold field are several round, empty sockets. These were originally settings for inlays of coloured glass paste or stones, which would have caught the light and given the nimbus the appearance of a jewelled object. The same device appears on the Lucca cross of Santa Maria degli Angeli, whose halo carries comparable inlays. It belonged to the shared repertory of the Berlinghieri workshop, and its loss here gives the halo the pitted, almost archaeological look it has today.

Christ is shown alive, with open eyes, as in the tradition of the Christus triumphans. His face is a long oval framed by heavy dark hair, parted in the centre and falling in long, wavy strands onto both shoulders. The strands are drawn in fine black lines that end in curling tips, an ornamental treatment characteristic of the Lucchese crosses. The brows are high and slightly arched, the nose long and straight, continuing the line of the brows, and the eyes large, dark and set under heavy lids. The short beard and moustache frame a small, closed mouth. The gaze is directed outward and slightly to one side, grave and attentive rather than suffering.

The modelling of the face shows clearly the Byzantine technique inherited from Berlinghiero. Over a greenish underlayer, the flesh is built up with warm ochre tones and refined with lighter highlights on the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones and the chin. Strong dark contours define the features. The neck is marked by stylised folds drawn as curved dark lines, a convention of Byzantine figure painting that recurs on the crosses of the Lucchese school. The chest is modelled more softly, with broad, pale highlights suggesting the swelling of the pectorals. Compared with the earlier works of the workshop, the transitions between light and shade are smoother, and the face has a fuller, more rounded volume.

The type of the living Christ is significant for the dating. By the middle of the thirteenth century the dead and suffering Christ, the Christus patiens, was spreading rapidly through Tuscany, above all through the work of Giunta Pisano. Berlinghiero’s own late cross from Fucecchio had already absorbed some of Giunta’s pathos while keeping Christ alive. The Avignon fragment shows that the Lucchese workshop continued to produce crosses with open-eyed Christs around 1250. The traditional type evidently remained in demand among its patrons, even as the new model gained ground. The face nevertheless has a gravity, a slight melancholy in the eyes, that reflects the more emotional sensibility of the second quarter of the century.

The surviving strip of blue ground at the right, with a narrow reddish border along its lower edge, gives an idea of the original colour scheme. As on the Lucca cross, the body of Christ was set against a deep blue cross, framed by decorative borders. That blue was probably made with an expensive pigment, as on the Tereglio cross, where restoration revealed lapis lazuli. Behind the blue, the lateral fields would have been gilded and occupied, most likely, by the full-length figures of the Virgin and Saint John. From the scale of the head, the complete cross must have been of considerable size, intended for a public church setting rather than private devotion.

The attribution to the school of Bonaventura Berlinghieri reflects the stylistic distance between the fragment and the works given to the father. Bonaventura, the most important of Berlinghiero’s sons, is documented between 1228 and 1274. His only signed work is the panel of Saint Francis at Pescia, dated 1235. After his father’s death he led the family workshop, which continued to produce crosses, Madonnas and smaller devotional works in the Byzantine-Lucchese idiom. The Avignon face shares the long oval, the ornamental hair and the dark, heavily lidded eyes of the father’s types. Its fuller volume and softer modelling, however, place it in the next generation, consistent with a date around 1245–1255.

The fragment raises the general difficulty of attributing works within the Berlinghieri workshop. Repeated models, shared ornamental devices and the collaboration of several family members make it almost impossible to distinguish individual hands with certainty, especially in a fragment that lacks the mourners, the terminals and the narrative details that might aid comparison. A designation such as “school of Bonaventura” or “workshop of the Berlinghieri” is therefore not an evasion but an accurate description of the evidence. The painting represents the production of a workshop whose collective style had been established by Berlinghiero and was carried forward by his sons for half a century after his death.

The Avignon Christ is the face of a work largely lost. Even in its damaged state it conveys the power these great crosses must have had in the churches of Lucca and its territory. The steady, open-eyed gaze of the living Christ, framed by a jewelled halo and set against a field of blue, presented the crucified Lord not as a victim but as the triumphant Saviour. The fragment’s survival in a French museum also shows the dispersal of the Italian Duecento heritage through the art market of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a reminder that the corpus of the Berlinghieri, as now known, is only a fraction of what their workshop once produced.

Fragment of a painted cross

The fragment preserves the right-hand end of the horizontal arm of a painted cross, as seen by the viewer: most of Christ’s left arm, outstretched against a dark blue ground, and the square terminal that closed the arm. The Petit Palais, as reported by the search snippet already mentioned, presents it as another element of the cross of which the Avignon fragment survives; the blue strip at the right of the Avignon panel and the ground behind the arm are consistent with that, but the link is the museum’s notice and not something this essay has verified. Everything else is lost, including the body of Christ, the opposite arm, the lateral fields, the cimasa and the suppedaneum. The panel shows extensive damage. The upper edge is broken and the wood exposed, large areas of ground and paint have flaked along the edges of the terminal and the lower border, and there are holes and losses in the lower left. The painted surface in the central zone and in the figure of the terminal is nonetheless relatively well preserved and legible.

The arm of Christ lies along the full length of the fragment, painted in a warm, greenish-yellow flesh tone over a darker green underlayer, the verdaccio of the Byzantine technique. The anatomy is simplified into a few broad, rounded volumes: the forearm, the swelling of the elbow drawn as two overlapping curved masses, and the upper arm. The contours are firm and continuous. This schematic but monumental treatment of the limb is characteristic of the large painted crosses of Lucca and Pisa in the second quarter and middle of the thirteenth century. A fine network of cracks covers the flesh, a sign of the age and movement of the paint layer.

The hand is the expressive focus of the fragment. It is open, with the palm turned towards the viewer, the long fingers extended and the thumb raised. At the centre of the palm a dark round wound marks the place of the nail, and from it three thin streams of red blood fall vertically against the blue ground, each ending in a small drop. The detail transforms the arm from a simple sign of the cross into a direct evocation of Christ’s suffering. Painted blood of this kind became increasingly prominent in Tuscan crosses with the spread of the Christus patiens and of the devotion to the wounds of Christ that the Franciscan movement promoted.

Whether the complete cross showed Christ alive or dead cannot be determined from the fragment alone. The arm is held almost perfectly horizontal and the hand is open and firm, without the sagging that often marks the outstretched arms of the dead Christ in Giuntesque crosses. That would be compatible with a Christus triumphans of the traditional Lucchese type. The emphasis on the bleeding wound, however, points to the new devotional sensibility of the mid-century. It may reflect a cross in which the triumphant type was already charged with the pathos of the Passion, as in Berlinghiero’s late cross from Fucecchio and in the production of his workshop after his death.

The dark blue ground behind the arm is framed above and below by a red border decorated with a row of small circles or pearls. This kind of ornamental band is typical of the Lucchese crosses. The ministerial catalogue entry for the Lucca cross of Santa Maria degli Angeli describes a red band with a row of white pearls as a kind of trademark of the Berlinghieri workshop. Such ornament was, however, widespread in Tuscan painting of the period, and on its own it cannot establish whether the cross came from Lucca or Pisa. A thin vertical red line separates the blue field from the terminal, marking the transition between the arm and the square end-field.

The terminal contains the half-length figure of a young, beardless, haloed figure with short curly hair. He wears a bright red mantle over a blue-green tunic with gold-hatched folds and turns slightly towards the arm of Christ. His head inclines towards his right shoulder with a melancholic expression, the brows slightly raised and the large eyes heavy-lidded. Behind his left shoulder the remains of a dark, feathered wing are visible against the gold. In his left hand he holds a long thin staff, which crosses his body diagonally. His right hand is raised before his breast in a gesture of grief or acknowledgement.

The Petit Palais, as reported by the snippet, names the figure Saint John. The wing and the staff visible in the photograph argue instead for an angel. John, often shown in the terminals of thirteenth-century crosses, is young and beardless and usually wears a red mantle, which may explain why the figure has been read as John. He is not, however, given wings or a staff. The thin rod is the herald’s staff carried by angels, and particularly by archangels, as messengers of God. If the figure is an angel, it would be consistent with the iconography of the Lamentation over the crucified Christ, in which angels share in the grief of the Virgin and Saint John. Without the opposite terminal, the precise programme cannot be reconstructed.

The style of the figure’s face confirms the Byzantinising culture of the painter. The face is modelled over a strong green underlayer, which shows through the flesh tones and gives the complexion an olive cast, with warm highlights on the cheeks, forehead and nose. The drawing of the features is precise and linear: the long, straight nose, the small mouth, the curved brows and the dark contours around the eyes. The drapery is treated with bold, angular folds outlined in white highlights. This vocabulary was shared by Lucchese and Pisan painters of the period and makes the distinction between the two schools particularly delicate.

The attribution question remains open. The attribution to Bonaventura Berlinghieri rests presumably on the general affinity of the fragment with the late production of the Berlinghieri workshop: the ornamental border, the type of the arm, the melancholy facial type. The alternative attribution, to the Master of Calci, would instead place the fragment within Pisan painting. Pisa, as the home of Giunta Pisano and his followers, was where the devotional emphasis on Christ’s wounds was most fully developed. The available evidence does not allow a decision between these possibilities. The safest course is to present the fragment as the work of a Lucchese or Pisan painter of the mid-thirteenth century while recording both proposals.

Whatever its precise attribution, the fragment shows well the transformation of the Tuscan painted cross around the middle of the thirteenth century. The traditional structure of the Lucchese cross, with its blue ground, ornamental borders and square terminals, survives here. It is combined with a new insistence on the physical reality of Christ’s suffering, visible in the bleeding wound, and on the emotional participation of the witnesses, visible in the sorrowing figure of the terminal. The fragment’s presence in Rio de Janeiro also documents the wide dispersal of thirteenth-century Italian panels, many of which survive only as pieces of larger works that once dominated the interiors of Tuscan churches.

Other proposals: Yale, Rome and Tereglio

The three Passion panels at Yale, the Crucifixion, Deposition and Lamentation, inventory 1871.1a–c, from the convent of San Francesco at San Miniato al Tedesco, were first attributed to Bonaventura in 1915. That attribution was soon disputed by a critic who contrasted the coarseness and emphatic style of the Yale scenes with the polished, austere manner of the Pescia panel. In 1949 Garrison recognised the central element of the same dismembered tabernacle in a Virgin and Child Enthroned from the convent of San Francesco at San Miniato al Tedesco, now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

Elsewhere Garrison assigned the whole complex to a provincial Lucchese follower active between 1270 and 1275. Later opinions have placed the complex in the circle of the Oblate Master in the 1250s, or in the Berlinghieri workshop in the 1240s. The Yale University Art Gallery’s own records, seen only through search snippets for this essay, class the panels as thirteenth-century Florentine work and give them to the circle of Bonaventura Berlinghieri, dated to the mid-1220s on stylistic grounds, that is before Pescia. A comparison with the Bigallo Master’s Saint Zenobius dossal, which the Yale catalogue is reported to use for its chronology, was not checked. Whatever the solution, the Yale panels no longer belong in any list of Bonaventura’s works, and their very instability is instructive.

The painted crosses form a further chapter. The cross in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome, from the destroyed oratory of San Donnino in Lucca, was attributed to Bonaventura by Garrison and later referred to a follower of Bonaventura. The cross in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, discussed above, is recorded under “circle of Bonaventura Berlinghieri” and generally dated 1250–1260, though some sources give 1260–1270; it is treated here as a work of the circle and not of Bonaventura. The cross of Santa Maria Assunta at Tereglio, in the Lucchese mountains, was proposed for Bonaventura in a publication of 2000, as the national catalogue entry for the signed cross of Berlinghiero in Lucca records, adding that an earlier publication, of 1998, had set the Tereglio cross after the Lucca cross.

The entry on Berlinghiero sets out the other proposals for the cross, from the master’s last years to the decade after his death, including a collaboration with the Master of the Cross no. 434. Here again the vacillation between father, son and workshop is not a failure of connoisseurship but a faithful reflection of the conditions under which these objects were made.

The cumulative effect of these debates is to dissolve the notion of a personal “oeuvre of Bonaventura Berlinghieri” beyond the Pescia panel. What remains is a workshop, documented through a father and three sons, whose characteristic language circulated in Lucca, Pisa, Florence and as far as Bologna, and within which individual hands can be distinguished only provisionally. Caleca suggested that, with due caution, groups belonging to one or another personality might perhaps be aggregated, or works of collaboration identified. That programme remains open. The responsible position, for the present, is to call the Pescia panel the work of Bonaventura, to call the Uffizi diptych a debated attribution, and to call the rest works of the Berlinghieri workshop or circle.

Conclusion

Bonaventura son of Berlinghiero emerges from the documents as an adult citizen of Lucca in 1228, a painter active in the decoration of the cathedral canonry in 1244, a guarantor for his brother in 1250, a stepfather who had trained a young painter who died in Sicily, and a man still alive in 1274. He emerges from the paint as the author of a single surviving panel, signed and dated 1235, whose inscription has been transcribed in more than one way but whose date and name are not in doubt. Between the documents and the panel lies a zone of hypothesis. It contains the reported lost San Miniato panel of 1228, whose attribution is unverified; the lost or copied panel at Guiglia; the Uffizi diptych, claimed for his late career but equally attributable to a close associate; and a scattering of crosses and narrative panels that belong more securely to the workshop than to any individual within it. Beyond that zone lies the territory of error, which the evidence allows us to clear. It includes the dates 1210–1287 and the Milanese origin.

What the panel itself preserves is of the first importance. Nine years after Francis’s death in October 1226 and seven years after his canonization in July 1228, Bonaventura gave visual form to a saint whose image was still in the making. He drew on the Byzantine icon and its narrative variant, on the Tuscan painted cross that his family knew so well, and, if the 1976 study is right, on an eye for ancient ornament that anticipates the classicising sensibility of the next generation. He showed the stigmata at a time when they were still contested. Among the episodes available to him he chose three from the life, the last of them, in the national catalogue’s reading, the founding of the Third Order, and three posthumous miracles of the kind recorded by Thomas of Celano. The Pescia panel is therefore not merely an early image of Francis. It is a witness to a Francis seen through Celano’s earlier account, before the Legenda maior of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, completed in 1263 and declared the sole official life in 1266, gave the saint the seraphic image of the alter Christus.

The panel’s later history shows how a thirteenth-century object could become a document in disputes its maker could not have imagined. A later canvas left only the face visible; the work was long misattributed to Margaritone before its recovery through restoration. Its recent journeys, to Freising in 2023 and back to Pescia in 2024, and its role as the point of reference for the commemorations of 2026, show that it continues to function as a site of devotion, scholarship and civic identity. For the historian of medieval art the lesson of Bonaventura Berlinghieri is one of method as much as of content. A name, a date and a single panel can sustain a great deal of interpretation, but only if the layers of evidence are kept distinct: document from inscription, inscription from attribution, attribution from hypothesis, and all of these from the errors that, once printed, so easily become facts.