Maestro di Sant'Alò

Introduction: an anonymous name and a double question

Late medieval painting in the Duchy of Spoleto is a crowd of conventional names. They exist because, in a territory almost without archives before the late fourteenth century and repeatedly struck by earthquakes, the painters’ real names have been lost along with the documents that would have recorded them. Among these provisional identities the Maestro di Sant’Alò occupies a special place.

Chronologically he stands at the threshold between the late Duecento tradition of Spoleto and the Giottesque transformation that radiated from the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. Historiographically he is one of the earliest of the Spoletan anonymi to have been isolated as an individual artistic personality, through a small, precious group of painted reliquaries rather than through a monumental cycle. And in the most recent literature he has been drawn, tentatively and with all due qualification, into one of the knottiest problems of Umbrian painting of the 1330s: the authorship of the frescoes in the Cappella di Santa Croce in the sanctuary of Santa Chiara at Montefalco, the chapel where Clare of Montefalco died in 1308.

This essay has two aims. The first is to reconstruct as precisely as the evidence allows how the Maestro di Sant’Alò was constructed as an artistic personality: from which objects, by whom, and with what subsequent revisions. The second is to examine the proposal that he might be the same painter as the so-called “Secondo Maestro della Beata Chiara da Montefalco,” and to clarify how this figure relates to the Primo Maestro, the painter of the great Crucifixion of 1333. Throughout, the essay separates what is documented, what is attributed by a broad consensus, and what is hypothetical.

The scholarship on this material is dense, often local and sometimes contradictory, and it is easy to let a suggestion harden into a fact through repetition. Three scholars have been decisive for this master’s identity and catalogue: Bruno Toscano, who first gave serious critical attention to the reliquaries in 1953; Alessandro Delpriori, whose 2015 synthesis La scuola di Spoleto reorganised the whole field and enlarged the catalogue; and Andrea De Marchi, whose introduction to that book formulated the hypothesis linking the Maestro di Sant’Alò to Montefalco. Other scholars are named where the sources consulted attribute a specific judgement to them, and the rest of the literature is described by its content and date.

Spoleto, Montefalco and the Valle Umbra around 1300

The Maestro di Sant’Alò belongs to a city with a strong sense of itself as a capital. Spoleto had been the seat of a Lombard duchy, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it had developed a school of painting that cannot be reduced to an appendix of Rome. Its painters cultivated, very early, the painted cross as a monumental type. In the Duecento the city produced refined masters known through signatures, such as the pair Simeone and Machilone and the painter Rainaldetto di Ranuccio, and the mixed workshops in which painting and polychrome wood sculpture were practised together. In his introduction to Delpriori’s book, De Marchi describes the continuity of this tradition across the turn of the century. The constants of Spoletan taste, formed in the Duecento, “remained substantially unaltered” with the passage to Giotto’s century. They conditioned the reception of the new pictorial ideals and bent them towards a chromatic and material fauve intensity, an exasperated gestural language “between cries of pain and heartbreaking tenderness,” and a nostalgic, “inoxidable” expressive temperature that binds the two centuries together.

The decisive external factor was the proximity of Assisi. Between roughly 1260 and 1320 the basilica of San Francesco hosted a sequence of international campaigns of glass painting, mural painting, goldsmiths’ work and sculpture, among them the work of Cimabue in the transept and apse, and then, on the nave, that of the Maestro della Cattura and of the young Giotto. These made the Spoletan hinterland a crossroads of foreign and local artists. Delpriori’s reading of the regional development is built around this centrality. In his words, “dal cantiere di Cimabue sortisce il Maestro delle Palazze,” and “a rimorchio è il Maestro di Sant’Alò, che guarda con attenzione al Maestro della Cattura e alle prime prove di Giotto.” The Maestro di Cesi, “the first of the Spoletan Giotteschi,” would, as De Marchi proposed, have been on the scaffolding of the Franciscan cycle itself, and the deeper assimilation of the Lower Church, of Simone Martini and of Pietro Lorenzetti came only with the Maestro di Fossa around the middle of the century. This sequence (Palazze, Sant’Alò, Cesi, the Maestro della Croce di Trevi, Fossa) is the backbone of current understanding of Spoletan painting from the 1280s to the 1340s. The Maestro di Sant’Alò is its second term, the painter who first registers in a Spoletan idiom the shock of the Assisi workshops after Cimabue.

The Valle Umbra between Spoleto, Foligno, Trevi and Montefalco was part of what the twentieth-century literature on Umbrian sculpture called “Umbria to the left of the Tiber.” This cultural sub-region was centred on Spoleto and its diocese and extended across the Apennines towards the Marche and the Aquilano. It was distinct from the Perugian and Orvietan “Umbria to the right of the Tiber,” which looked more directly towards Tuscany. Typologies that are rare elsewhere were frequent here. Among them were tabernacles with a carved image at the centre and painted narrative shutters, painted crosses with figured lateral terminals and a God the Father or Christ in glory in the cimasa, and small painted reliquaries. Polyptychs of the Gothic type were almost absent. Female monastic houses were among the principal patrons, which conditioned both the types of objects and the intimate, close-range character of much of the narrative painting.

Montefalco, a hill town above the plain between Foligno and Spoleto, took on a disproportionate importance in the first half of the fourteenth century. One reason was the cult of Clare, daughter of Damiano, the Augustinian¹ abbess who died in her monastery in August 1308. The sources disagree between the 17th and the 18th of the month, the 17th being the more commonly cited date. The other reason was the frequent residence there of officials of the papal administration of the Duchy of Spoleto in the years of the Avignon papacy. The most important of these for present purposes is the Provençal Jean d’Amiel², rector of the Duchy in the 1320s and early 1330s. Recent studies date his rectorate to 1323–1332. He later became bishop of Spoleto; the sources consulted disagree on the dates, one giving 1348 and the notice of the chapter of Fréjus giving his appointment as 23 October 1349. Jean d’Amiel commissioned the frescoes of the Cappella di Santa Croce in 1333 and, some years later, the great polyptych for San Francesco at Montefalco that the Vatican curators give to the Maestro di Fossa. The date 1336 and his name were recovered in the inscription of that polyptych during the restoration carried out at the Vatican Museums in 2017.

The cult of Clare of Montefalco and the canonisation process

The Santa Croce frescoes cannot be understood without the cult they served. Clare had entered as a girl the reclusorium founded by her elder sister Giovanna. The community moved to a new site within the town in the early 1280s and adopted the Augustinian rule. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Clare promoted the construction of an oratory dedicated to the Holy Cross, where she lived and where she was buried. The present Cappella di Santa Croce is what survives of that building: its presbytery, now incorporated on the left of the later church of Santa Chiara.

What happened after Clare’s death gave the cult its extraordinary iconographic character. The nuns opened her body and claimed to find in her heart the instruments of the Passion, including a crucifix and a scourge, formed in flesh, and in her gall bladder three globes of equal size, weight and colour, read as a sign of the Trinity. The episcopal vicar of Spoleto, the Frenchman Béranger de Saint-Affrique³, was sent to examine these claims and was transformed, in the words of a modern study, from inquisitor into convinced champion of her sanctity. He wrote her Vita between 1309 and 1310 and promoted her cause.

A diocesan inquiry was ordered by the bishop of Spoleto, Pietro Paolo Trinci, on 18 June 1309. Béranger then took the dossier to the papal court. John XXII⁴ ordered the apostolic process in October 1317, and the hearing of witnesses opened at Montefalco on 6 September 1318 and closed in July 1319. Several hundred witnesses were heard; the figures given reach 486. The cause then stalled for reasons external to its merits. Clare was beatified in 1737 and canonised only in 1881 by Leo XIII. The acts of the process survive incompletely and are available in a critical edition first published in 1984 and reprinted in 1991.

Two aspects of this history bear directly on the paintings. The first is chronological. The frescoes of 1333 were painted while the canonisation was suspended, a quarter of a century after Clare’s death. They therefore functioned as a visual affirmation of a sanctity not yet recognised by Rome, sponsored by the highest papal official in the Duchy. That is why the Santa Croce cycle always speaks of the “Beata” and why the two anonymous painters are called “Masters of Blessed Clare.” The second is iconographic. The defining image of the cult is the vision in which Christ, carrying the cross, plants it in Clare’s heart. It translates into painting the physical “finding” of the cross in her heart, and the Santa Croce chapel gives it a central position inside the Gothic tabernacle over her former tomb.

The eponymous works: the reliquaries of Sant’Alò

The name “Maestro di Sant’Alò” derives not from the original setting of the works but from their last ecclesiastical home before they entered public collections. The core of the catalogue is a group of three painted reliquaries. The national catalogue entries call them “a true and proper corpus”: a cross reliquary (stauroteca) painted on both faces, and two rectangular reliquary panels (“tabelle”). All three are in tempera on panel, with gold, punched decoration and threaded beads or cabochons of coloured glass set along their profiles. The cross measures 45 by 28.3 centimetres (inventory 1076). The tabelle measure 24.1 by 30 centimetres (inventory 1077) and 24 by 29.5 centimetres (inventory 1078). An older record of the cross, compiled in 1996, gives 39 by 29 centimetres. On its recto, according to the national catalogue description, the cross presents a Christus patiens exhausted by his torments, with an armed crowd of soldiers on one side and centurions on the other.

A recess protected by glass in the cimasa held a small silver cross containing a relic of the True Cross. The long painted inscription in Gothic letters on the cimasa enumerates its contents. It lists relics of Peter and Paul, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene; of the blood of the blessed Francis⁵ and of his tunic; relics of “sancta Clara virgo,” that is, Clare of Assisi⁶; and, in the little silver cross, wood of the True Cross, fragments of the Lord’s garments, cradle and purple robe, and hair of the Virgin. All of these, it says, were given “tempore papae Gregorii.” The inscription along the upper margin of one of the tabelle names the relics of the martyrs it holds: Stephen, Blaise, John Chrysostom, Christopher, Gervasius and Protasius, Vincent, Eustace, Pantaleon, Boniface and Erasmus. The inscriptions of the two tabelle are of the same kind: that of the tabella of martyrs is quoted below, and the other lists apostles and virgin saints and adds that the names of some of the relics are not known. Delpriori singles out the figure of Saint Francis at the foot of the verso: he is shown white-haired and with a long beard, which Delpriori finds very unusual for Umbria at a date he places in the first decade of the Trecento, and which differs from the type proposed at Assisi.

The provenance of the reliquaries is unusually well traced for objects of this kind. They were made for the female monastery of San Paolo inter vineas, outside the walls of Spoleto, whose church, according to the national catalogue, Gregory IX⁷ reconsecrated after his election in 1227; one guide gives 1234 for his gift of relics to the nuns. They followed the nuns through their successive moves: to Sant’Agata in 1396, then to Sant’Ansano, and in 1885 to the small church of Sant’Alò, the Spoletan form of Sant’Eligio. In the 1960s the transfer of the community from Sant’Alò to Santa Lucia at Trevi threatened to take the reliquaries out of Spoleto. The Comune intervened, and the group was purchased by the Ministry of Public Instruction on 5 October 1973 and assigned to the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria; an older record gives the purchase as 1974. It was deposited in 1982 in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Spoleto and is now displayed in the Museo Nazionale del Ducato in the Rocca Albornoziana, still state property. The national catalogue also records an “icon with the figure of the Redeemer” kept in the same case (inventory 1079, 16 by 9 centimetres). It is not part of the group: the catalogue dates it about 1190–1210 and places it in a Venetian or Byzantine sphere, and it is excluded from the critical history of the reliquaries.

Two uncertainties in the documentation should be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. The first concerns the pope named in the inscription, which says only “tempore papae Gregorii”: the national catalogue reads Gregory IX, while a presentation of the 2026 Perugia exhibition, seen only in a search summary, points to Gregory X (discussed below with the inscription). Current scholarship places the paintings around 1290–1310, and the same presentation gave the cross a date of about 1300. The second uncertainty concerns the community: the national catalogue speaks of Benedictine⁸ nuns, Delpriori of an “antico monastero di clarisse,” and the 2026 presentation of Damianites, that is, Clarissan nuns. The relics of Francis and of Clare of Assisi in the inscription are compatible with a Franciscan-oriented female house. The question of the community’s rule around 1300 would need archival verification that has not been possible here.

The Sant’Alò Reliquary Cross (recto): Christus patiens between Longinus and the Centurion

This cross is one of the three painted reliquaries from which the Master of Sant’Alò has been reconstructed, together with the two rectangular panels (provenance and later history are given above).

The national catalogue calls the cross and the two panels “a true and proper corpus”. It explains their attribution by an Umbrian stylistic peculiarity, formed in contact with manuscript illumination and with the renewal of the Assisi workshops in the last two decades of the Duecento. Delpriori sets their painter in the generation formed at Assisi after Cimabue, “in tow” of the Maestro della Cattura, and calls him rare, known “only for a handful of works”; he compares the saints of the tabelle with the series of apostles in the chapel of San Nicola in the Lower Church at Assisi, which Serena Romano dated to 1296–1297, and concludes that the tabelle were painted after that campaign, “perhaps already in the first decade of the Trecento.”

The cross is a reliquary first and an image second, and its form follows from that function. It is cut from a single board with stepped, angular terminals that imitate the profile of a monumental painted cross in miniature. It is painted on both faces. The recto, shown here, carries the long inscription and the glazed recess for the relics of the Passion. On the verso, according to the catalogue, a simpler dead Christ slumps lifeless from the cross among saints, and the cimasa holds a second small glazed compartment for relics. A punched border runs close to the edge on both faces: in the catalogue’s words, a double row of dots enclosing small stars. Coloured glass beads are threaded along the shaped perimeter at the corners formed by the cut-outs of the wood. Only a few survive in this image, but they would once have given the edges a jewelled flicker. The cross thus borrows the language of the goldsmith’s stauroteca and translates it into the cheaper, warmer medium of tempera and gold leaf. The painted surface does duty for metalwork, and the beads act as a token of precious stones.

Christ hangs in the fully developed patiens type. His head sinks onto his right shoulder, his eyes are closed, and his long dark hair falls in strands over the shoulder. The gold nimbus is incised with a cross. The body is lean and sallow, the rib cage and the pit of the stomach marked by fine, graphic modelling. The arms do not hang in the deep catenary of the Cimabuesque crosses but run almost straight along the patibulum. The hips swing gently to the left and the legs bend at the knee, so that the weight seems to pull downward without the dramatic arching of Giunta’s tradition. The loincloth is the most refined passage of the figure. It is a thin, partly translinear veil knotted at the right hip and edged with woven bands of red and blue stripes, a textile detail of illuminator’s precision. Thin rivulets of red run from the nailed hands and, at the base, from the feet. The arms and upright of the cross lie against a dark ground with lighter blue patches. In this image it reads as an abraded field of blue, perhaps azurite over a dark preparation, and it would need technical examination to be interpreted securely.

The left flank is occupied by a compact group of soldiers, as the catalogue describes: the armed crowd on Christ’s right side. Four helmeted men stand close together in green tunics and red cloaks, their spears rising in a thicket of thin lines incised into the gold behind them. A round shield appears at the back of the group. The foremost soldier drives his lance into Christ’s side, and a small burst of red marks the wound. He is the lance-bearer of John’s Gospel, known in the medieval tradition as Longinus. The painter turns the scene into a sequence of profiles and three-quarter heads set one behind another. The device creates depth through overlapping rather than through a constructed space, and it is close to the crowd scenes of the Assisi Upper Church, reduced here to a few square centimetres.

On the opposite side stands the centurion, in a Roman muscle cuirass with a fringed skirt of leather straps, a green mantle and a sword. He raises his right hand towards Christ in the gesture of witness, the confession “Truly this man was the Son of God” given in the Synoptic Gospels. Behind him an older bearded man, possibly one of the bystanders who share in the recognition, leans forward with a vehement gesture, and further helmets and spears crowd behind them. Bringing together the lance-thrust and the centurion’s recognition on the two sides of the cross compresses the moment of death and its immediate theological meaning into a single image. The arrangement belongs to the populous Calvary that Assisi had made current. Here it is not a narrative fresco but a framing device around a cult image, a solution that suits an object meant to be handled and contemplated at close range.

The mourners occupy the expanded side terminals, as on the large painted crosses. On the left the Virgin stands in a dark mantle over a red garment, raising her hand to her face in the traditional gesture of grief. On the right St John, beardless and youthful, wears a red mantle over a green tunic and inclines his head. Both are set against gold within the punched borders. Their tall, narrow proportions and the long, sharp folds of their drapery contrast with the stockier soldiers below. The mourners belong to the hieratic register of the cross, while the soldiers belong to the narrative.

At the foot, below the green block on which the cross is planted, a haloed figure kneels in a brown habit and a dark veil, with a white band visible beneath the veil at the face. The figure presses its face to Christ’s feet as the blood runs down over it. The catalogue description does not identify it. The dress, a monastic habit with a wimple-like band rather than the red mantle and loose hair of the Magdalene, suggests a female religious saint. The most plausible candidate is St Clare of Assisi, whose relics the inscription records in the cross itself. This is a reading of the image, not a documented identification. If correct, it would make the kneeling saint a direct visual counterpart to the relic beneath the glass, and a model of devotion for the nuns who owned the object. The composition adapts the motif, current in Franciscan art since Assisi, of a saint embracing the foot of the cross. It gives it to a woman for a community of women.

The cimasa carries the inscription that makes the cross a document as well as an image. It is painted in white Gothic majuscules on a red ground and continues down around the glazed recess that holds the small silver cross.

The text is heavily abbreviated, with the Tironian sign 7 for et and frequent suspension marks. In this image the upper block can be read approximately as

IN ISTO LO[CO] S(UN)T R(ECONDITE) S(ANCTE) RELIQUIE AP(OSTOLO)RU(M) PE(TRI) 7 PAU(LI) 7 S(AN)C(T)I IO(HANN)IS B(APTISTE) 7 M(ARIE) MAGDALENE. DE SA(N)GUI(NE) B(EATI) F(RANCISCI) 7 TUNICE EI(US). 7 DE R(ELIQUIIS) S(AN)C(T)E CLA(RE) V(IRGINIS) 7 DE R(ELIQUIIS) MULTOR(UM) S(ANCTORUM). IN CRUCE ARGENTEA PARVULA E(ST) VE(RE) CRUCIS LIGNU(M). DE VESTIMENTIS D(OMI)NI. DE CUNA D(OMI)NI. DE PUR…

The expansion of the sigla is a provisional reading and should be checked against the object. The national catalogue gives the whole text in normalised form, with a lacuna it does not fill:

IN ISTO LOCO SUNT RECONDITAE SANCTAE RELIQUIE APOSTOLORUM PETRI ET PAULI, ET SANCTI JOHANNIS BAPTSTAE [sic] ET MARIAE MAGDALENAE, DE SANGUINE BEATI FRANCISCI ET TUNICE EIUS, ET DE RELIQUIS SANCTAE CLARAE VIRGINIS ET DE RELIQUIS MULTORUM SANCTORUM. IN CRUCE ARGENTEA PARVULAE EST VERAE CRUCIS LIGNUM, DE VESTIMENTIS DOMINI, DE CUNA DOMINI, DE PURPURA DOMINI, DE CAPILLIS MATRI[S] EIUS, ET RELIQUIE MULTORUM SANCTORUM QUAS DEDERUNT … TEMPORE PAPAE GREGORII.

In English: “In this place are laid up the holy relics of the apostles Peter and Paul, and of Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene; of the blood of blessed Francis and of his tunic; and of the relics of Saint Clare, virgin, and of the relics of many saints. In the little silver cross is wood of the True Cross, of the garments of the Lord, of the cradle of the Lord, of the purple of the Lord, of the hair of his Mother, and relics of many saints, which […] gave in the time of Pope Gregory.” The names of the donors after dederunt are not given in the published transcription, and the lower lines around the glass cannot be read in this image.

The inscription raises a chronological problem it does not solve. The catalogue links the gift to Gregory IX, elected in 1227, who reconsecrated the nuns’ church. Faloci Pulignani, who deciphered the inscriptions in 1909, dated the complex before 1276, which is compatible with Gregory X (1271–1276), and the presentation of the 2026 exhibition also speaks of a gift by Gregory X. Two observations make the question less straightforward than it seems.

First, the relic of “sancta Clara virgo” can hardly date from Gregory IX’s pontificate, since Clare died in 1253 and was canonised in 1255. Second, the clause “quas dederunt … tempore papae Gregorii” follows the sentence on the relics of the Passion, so grammatically it may refer only to the contents of the silver cross, not to the whole list. In either case the papal date records the gift of the relics, not the making of the painted container. The relics could have been rehoused decades later in a new and more splendid reliquary, which is what the style of the painting implies.

The catalogue’s date of c. 1290–1310 rests on stylistic grounds. The painting’s closest terms of comparison point to the years around 1300. The populous Calvary, the overlapping heads of the soldiers and the heavy hanging body presuppose the Assisi campaigns of the late 1280s and 1290s, and Delpriori’s reasoning from the chapel of San Nicola would place the tabelle, and so probably the cross, after 1296–1297.

The graphic sharpness of the modelling, the striped textiles and the enamel-like reds of the inscription still speak the language of the local Duecento and of illumination. Andrea De Marchi has described this painter’s expressiveness as bittersweet, woven of unripe assimilations between Cimabuesque and proto-Giottesque forms. On the recto of the Sant’Alò cross that formula takes visible shape. A cult image of the new Assisi type is reduced to the scale of a precious object, without losing its intensity or the attentive devotion of the women for whom it was made.

The Sant’Alò Reliquary Cross (verso): the Dead Christ among the Saints of the Relics

The reverse of the Sant’Alò cross carries the second face of a two-sided object designed to be turned in the hands, carried, or displayed so that both sides could be seen. The national catalogue gives this face its own record. It describes the verso iconography as Christ collapsing from the cross surrounded by saints. The cimasa holds a small glazed compartment for further relics, set in correspondence with the inscription on the recto. There the subject is the historical drama of the Passion, crowded with soldiers. The verso offers a quieter, more devotional and more ecclesial image. It answers the front point by point.

Christ is here, in the catalogue’s words, a simpler Christus patiens, his body already dead, fallen and lifeless. The difference from the recto is deliberate and visible. The arms rise in a steeper V, so that the weight of the body seems to drag downward from the nailed hands. The head sinks lower and further forward onto the chest. The torso sags, the belly protrudes slightly above the loincloth, and the knees bend more sharply. Delpriori reads the pose differently, as strange and contorted: the face turned to one side, the hips to the other, and the feet fixed with a single nail so that the legs almost cross. He relates it to the widespread Umbrian diffusion of the Duecento Christus dolorosus. The image bears out the single nail and the crossed legs. The painter has given the two faces two moments of the same death. On the front Christ has just died, under the lance and the centurion’s gaze. On the back the dead body simply hangs, offered to contemplation. The modelling is the same as on the recto: a fine graphic hatching of the sallow flesh, the ribs and stomach muscles drawn with an illuminator’s line rather than built up in mass. The loincloth is again a thin ochre cloth bound at the hips and edged with woven stripes of red and blue. Rivulets of blood run from the hands and, at the base, pour from the feet.

Above Christ’s head a red plaque bears the only inscription on this face. In white Gothic majuscules with interpuncts it reads “·I·N·R·I·”, the abbreviated title of John 19:19, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. The catalogue transcribes it as “I.N.R.I.”, painted with the brush in Gothic characters in Latin. Unlike the long dedicatory text of the recto, the titulus belongs to the image, not to the reliquary. It treats the little panel as a monumental painted cross in miniature, complete with the title board that crowns the great crosses of the Duecento. The cross itself is painted a dark tone with patches of a lighter blue, plausibly azurite surviving over a dark preparation. It is extensively abraded on both the upright and the arms. The losses are conspicuous in the image and would need technical examination before they can be interpreted with confidence.

The cimasa is occupied by the second relic compartment, a small rectangular recess behind glass framed by a painted border with a wavy line. Through the glass the relics themselves are visible as small bundles wrapped in white and reddish textile. No labels can be read in this image, and the catalogue records none. Two standing angels flank the compartment against the gold. On the left one wears a dark mantle with red wings, on the right one wears red with greyish-blue wings. They are not narrative figures. They act as guardians and presenters of the relics, a role familiar from metalwork reliquaries, where angels hold or display the sacred contents. Here they turn the theca into a small heavenly shrine set at the summit of the image, directly above the title of the Crucified.

The most instructive feature of the verso is its choice of saints. Beside the cross on the left stand Mary Magdalene, with long loose hair and a red-violet mantle, and St Paul, with high forehead, dark beard and red tunic, holding the sword of his martyrdom. On the right stand St Peter, with white curly hair and beard, a blue tunic and yellow mantle, holding a red book, and behind him a shaggy-haired bearded saint whom the catalogue’s list of figures identifies as St John the Baptist. At the foot kneels St Francis.

These are, almost exactly, the saints whose relics the recto inscription names: Peter and Paul, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, and the blood and tunic of Francis. The verso can therefore be read as a visual index of the relics enclosed in the object. It gathers around the dead Christ the saints whose remains lie in the wood beneath the paint, so that the nuns could see who was physically present in the reliquary they venerated. As far as can be determined, this correspondence is not spelled out in the published catalogue entries. It follows directly from comparing the inscription with the catalogue’s list of figures.

The four saints are painted in pairs that overlap in depth, each head turned slightly towards its companion or towards Christ. The device is the same one used for the soldiers on the recto, and it gives the small groups a sense of conversation within a shallow space defined only by overlapping. The figures are more slender and more elegant than the soldiers, and their drapery falls in long, fine folds edged with light. The palette is the jewel-like palette of the whole object: vermilion, ultramarine-like blues, yellow ochre and green set against burnished gold. Here it is used with a clear sense of chromatic rhythm. Paul’s red is answered across the cross by Peter’s blue and yellow, and the Magdalene’s dark violet by the Baptist’s red. In small format the effect approaches the brilliance of contemporary illumination, the medium the national catalogue names as one of the painter’s points of contact.

In the side terminals stand the Virgin and St John the Evangelist, the traditional mourners, repeated from the recto. The Virgin on the left wears a dark blue mantle over red and clasps her hands in grief. St John on the right, youthful and beardless, wears a red mantle over a green tunic. Their presence on both faces keeps the cross faithful to the scheme of the large painted crucifixes. On the verso, however, they are no longer the only witnesses. They become the outer frame of a wider assembly of saints, so the image moves from the Gospel scene of Calvary towards an image of the Church gathered around the sacrifice.

At the foot of the cross, below the green block that stands for the rock of Golgotha, St Francis kneels in his brown habit with the hood drawn up. He presses his face against the pierced feet as the blood runs down over him. The catalogue’s list of figures confirms the identification. Francis is white-haired and bearded in Delpriori’s description, the unorthodox type he noted above.

In this image the figure is small, hooded and seen mostly from behind and in shadow, so that his hair and beard cannot be made out; the identification rests on the catalogue’s list of figures and on Delpriori, who recognises him by his habit and stigmata. The motif of Francis embracing the foot of the cross had been made canonical by the Franciscan Crucifixions at Assisi. In this cross the Franciscan reference is reinforced by the relics of Francis’s blood and tunic listed on the front. The recto shows at the same place a haloed figure in a habit and veil, plausibly St Clare, whose relics the inscription also names. If that reading is correct, the cross would set the founder and the foundress of the Franciscan movement at the foot of the two faces of the same image. That would be a meaningful programme for a female community whose rule and Franciscan affiliation around 1300 still need archival clarification.

The verso also confirms that the cross was meant to be seen from both sides. Both faces are finished to the same level and both contain relics. The object was probably carried in procession or exhibited on an altar in a stand that allowed it to be turned, although no documentary evidence about its liturgical use has come down to us. The division of content between the two faces is coherent. The recto declares the contents in writing and shows the historical Passion. The verso shows the saints of the relics, guards the second theca with angels, and presents the body of Christ for contemplation. The reliquary thus works both as a container and as a complete devotional programme, a theological statement made at the scale of a book cover.

The construction of an artistic personality

The critical history of the reliquaries, as summarised in the national catalogue entries compiled at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria and in an older record of the Comune di Spoleto, begins with a local historian. In 1909 Faloci Pulignani deciphered the inscriptions, dated the group before 1276 and stressed its hagiographical interest, but he was not concerned with style or authorship. The reliquaries entered art history proper with Bruno Toscano’s study of 1953. There he “rediscovered” the group and traced in it stylistic components of the Cimabuesque and Cavallinesque milieu, that is, of the Roman culture associated with Pietro Cavallini and its presence at Assisi, and he related it to the cross no. 74 of the Perugia gallery and to the work of the Maestro delle Palazze. This is the founding moment of the personality. From then on the reliquaries were treated as the work of a single, distinctive painter whose language combined the linearism of the local Duecento with a knowledge of the new Assisi painting. Who first used the convenience name “Maestro di Sant’Alò” in print is not stated in the sources consulted. It is therefore safest to say that the name, taken from the church where the objects were then kept, crystallised in the literature after Toscano’s study.

The reception of Toscano’s reading was not uniform. Roberto Longhi, in a work of 1973 cited by the catalogue, recognised the high quality of the painter but defined him as an exquisitely Umbrian personality. The divergence matters. Toscano read the reliquaries through their links to Roman painting, while Longhi insisted on autonomy within a specifically Umbrian expressive tradition. These two positions anticipate the later debate over whether the Maestro di Sant’Alò should be understood as a provincial reflection of metropolitan models or as an originator within a local school.

In 1974 Toscano returned to the problem and brought the first addition to the catalogue outside the reliquaries. This was a fresco fragment with the head of an angel in the church of Santa Maria at Morro near Spoleto, which he compared with the saints of the tabelle. The addition gave the painter a mural dimension, small as it is, and suggested that he was not exclusively a miniaturist working on precious objects. Filippo Todini, in works of 1986 and 1989 that the catalogue cites without distinguishing, confirmed that the master was a Spoletan artist who reworked elements of the Roman and Assisi traditions, and presented him as the immediate antecedent of the great Maestro di Cesi.

The most important enlargement of the catalogue came with Delpriori. His book of 2015 grew out of a doctoral thesis discussed at Florence in 2010, and devotes a chapter, “Dopo Cimabue, il Maestro di Sant’Alò,” to the painter. There Delpriori attributes to him the large painted Crucifix in the Raccolta d’arte di San Francesco at Trevi, rejecting the earlier attribution to the Maestro della Cattura, and the group of choir books that he argues had come from San Domenico at Spoleto and passed to Perugia, where they are now in the Biblioteca Augusta. The captions of his illustrations give the choir-book miniatures to the Maestro di Sant’Alò without a query, and he dates the older nucleus of the series to the second half of the 1290s, while the captions of the Trevi Crucifix carry a question mark. De Marchi, introducing the volume, endorsed the first proposal without reservation, writing that the master’s corpus is “giustamente incrementato con la nobile Croce del Museo di Trevi”. He reported the second more neutrally as a “proposto collegamento,” a proposed connection. The Crucifix thus became, in the most recent scholarship, the largest and most ambitious work attributed to the Maestro di Sant’Alò. With it, his profile changed from that of a refined painter of reliquaries to that of a painter capable of monumental cult images.

The Trevi Crucifix

The Trevi Crucifix deserves a close description, both because it is the principal recent addition to the catalogue and because its attribution history mirrors the uncertainties surrounding the master. It is a shaped panel in tempera with a silver ground, measuring 190 by 129 centimetres, now in the first-floor Pinacoteca of the San Francesco museum complex at Trevi. It came from the church of San Pietro in Pettine, just outside Trevi. The crucified Christ occupies the shaft. In the mixtilinear, cusped cimasa Christ appears in glory within a blue mandorla supported by angels, and the mourners occupy the expanded terminals of the arms.

The attribution history is instructive. Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà, in her study of the painted cross published in 1929, listed the Trevi cross as the work of an anonymous Spoletan painter, and Delpriori credits her with recognising the shaped carpentry of the cross as specifically Spoletan. In 1981 Miklós Boskovits proposed the “high-sounding” attribution, as the Trevi museum entry calls it, to the Maestro della Cattura. This is the elusive painter of the Upper Church at Assisi who embodies the tumultuous transition on the scaffolding from the Cimabuesque and Torritian workshops to the young Giotto.

The Trevi museum entry gives the transfer to the Maestro di Sant’Alò as a recent proposal on stylistic grounds, consistent with Delpriori’s published position. The entry places the Sant’Alò painter among the artists who “descend from the Maestro della Cattura.” The entry describes the general elegance of the cross, “with vibrant garments and the flesh of Christ animated by a beautiful hatching of white lead,” as recalling contemporary Sienese painting, “almost making one think of an Umbrian Duccism.” It dates the work to about 1290–95, tied to the building campaigns of the papacy of Nicholas IV⁹ (1288–1292).

The Trevi cross is a strong but not unanimous addition. Its quality and its links to the Assisi transition are not in doubt. Delpriori grants Boskovits that the cross dates to the end of the Duecento, perhaps around 1290, but argues that its author is not the Maestro della Cattura but a “creato” of his, the Maestro di Sant’Alò. His grounds are comparisons of faces: the surviving angel of the Glory with the Saint Christopher of one tabella, the Saint John of the terminal with the Saint Philip of the reliquary, down to the identical mouth and the wavy sideburns in liquid colour, and again Saint John with the Saint John of the small cross in the Rocca Albornoziana, which he finds almost superimposable. The question that remains is whether such comparisons between a cross nearly two metres high and reliquaries less than half a metre high are firm enough to support a common authorship, since the fire damage and the reductions of the cross complicate them. The caption of Delpriori’s own illustration of the cross carries a question mark.

That is exactly the cultural position Delpriori assigns to the Maestro di Sant’Alò. In this sense the new attribution does not displace the Assisi connection but relocates it: from an Assisi protagonist to a Spoletan follower close to him. Both the reliquary cross and the Trevi Crucifix were exhibited in the 2018 exhibition Capolavori del Trecento. Il cantiere di Giotto, Spoleto e l’Appennino under the name of the Maestro di Sant’Alò, and the reliquary cross appeared again in the 2026 Perugia exhibition. The name has thus passed from specialist literature into the museum presentation of the material.

The Trevi Crucifix: a Monumental Christus patiens by the Master of Sant’Alò

The Crucifix now in the art collection of the San Francesco museum complex at Trevi is the largest and most ambitious work currently attributed to the Master of Sant’Alò, and the one that most changed his profile: before it, he was known only through three small reliquaries and a fresco head at Morro. Its attribution history is given above.

The cross comes from the church of San Pietro in Pettine, just outside Trevi. A nineteenth-century local scholar, Mariano Guardabassi, saw it still hanging on the right wall of the presbytery, according to Delpriori. Its physical history has been harsh. A fire left visible marks across the panel, including a loss on the right flank that exposes the wooden support. At some point the terminals with the mourners were cut down to the width of the arms, sacrificing part of their painted surface. In the image the Virgin and St John survive only as narrow vertical strips at the ends of the crossbar. The cimasa is broken on its left side, and the foot of the cross has lost most of its paint, so that the lower shaft shows bare, split wood. According to the museum entry, a raised frame originally ran round the whole image, with a red lake laid on its inner edge, and long stretches of that edge survive. The cross was restored in 1996 and again in 2013 by the Spoletan firm Coo.Be.C.

The museum entry describes the back as painted in red imitation marble. It concludes, as Delpriori does, that the cross was meant to be seen from behind as well, probably standing on a small screen or tramezzo. This detail places the object in a precise liturgical situation. A painted cross on a screen marked the threshold between the part of the church reserved to the clergy or community and the part open to the laity. It was seen from both directions, at a height that made the large figure of Christ legible from the nave. The marbled back is a modest but telling finish: even the side that carried no image was treated with care. It belongs to a wider pattern in the Spoletan territory, where the small reliquary cross by the same painter was likewise finished on both faces.

The figure of Christ belongs to the patiens type, the dead Christ with closed eyes and head fallen on the right shoulder. It is a severe and emaciated variant. The arms run almost straight along the patibulum, not in the deep curve of Cimabue’s crosses. The open hands are pierced, and thin trickles of blood fall from the nail wounds against the dark band of the crossbar. The torso is long and gaunt, the ribs drawn as a ladder of fine lines, and below them the belly swells in a rounded curve. Delpriori calls the swelling slight by comparison with the many analogous Umbrian images of the period, and relates it to Giunta Pisano’s cross for the Porziuncola, whose size (174 by 131 centimetres) is close to that of the Trevi cross; he also sees the body slightly arched to the right, after the oldest patiens type, and the hands still elongated on the example of Cimabue. The side wound is set high on Christ’s right and spurts blood down the body. The modelling of the flesh is, in the museum entry’s words, animated by “a beautiful hatching of white lead”: a fine, graphic network of light strokes that builds up form without blurring the contour. The same technique of linear hatching characterises the small Christ figures of the reliquaries.

The loincloth is a single sheet of bright vermilion falling to the knees, crossed by black dashes that read as the stripes of a woven border and as the folds of the cloth. Against the pale flesh and the darkened ground it is the strongest colour accent in the panel, and it is the first thing a viewer sees from a distance. The red loincloth differs from the ochre, striped veils of the reliquary cross, but the conception is related. In both, the cloth is treated as a textile with an ornamental selvage rather than as a mass of sculptural folds. The museum entry speaks of “vibrant garments” and of a general elegance recalling contemporary Sienese painting. It goes as far as an “Umbrian Duccism”, a formula that fits the linear sharpness and decorative intelligence with which the painter handles both cloth and body.

The ground was laid in silver rather than gold. Silver leaf, cheaper than gold and often glazed to imitate it, darkens as it oxidises. In the image the broad panels flanking Christ’s body appear mottled brown and grey, and the fire damage has made the effect worse. The original appearance would have been very different: a bright metallic field against which the vermilion loincloth and the pale body stood out sharply. Behind the arms and along the shaft runs a dark band representing the wood of the cross. Thin red lines near the hands may belong to its painted decoration or edging, but the image does not allow a confident reading. The flanking panels show no narrative scenes. As far as can be judged, they were plain metallic fields, so the image concentrates entirely on the body of Christ and the figures at the extremities.

The cimasa carries Christ in glory within a blue-green mandorla. He wears red, blesses with his right hand and holds a red book in his left. An angel with dark wings dotted with white stands at the right edge of the mandorla, and the entry says angels support it. The left side of the cimasa, where a second angel presumably stood, is lost. The museum entry calls the top “mixtilinear and cuspidate”, a form that can now be reconstructed only in part. The combination of figured lateral terminals with the Godhead enthroned in a mandorla in the cimasa was already recognised in 1929 as typical of Spoleto, a point Delpriori singles out as prescient. The Trevi cross is a good example of that local formula, which differs from the Tuscan practice of placing a half-length Christ or a clipeus with the blessing Christ at the top.

Below the mandorla a red plaque carries the titulus in two lines of white Gothic majuscules. The museum entry transcribes it as

I(e)H(su)S NAZAREN(us) REX IUDEO(rum),

that is, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (John 19:19). The name of Jesus appears in the standard abbreviation IHS, with a mark of suspension, and the final syllables of Nazarenus and Iudaeorum are cut off by abbreviation. The text is the full title, not the more common initials INRI found on the reliquary cross. On a cross intended for viewing at a distance, the extended form doubles as an inscription and as a decorative red band beneath the mandorla.

The dating proposed in the museum entry, c. 1290–1295, agrees with Delpriori’s “around 1290”. The entry argues that the date cannot diverge much from the arrival of the Maestro della Cattura on the scaffolding, probably around 1290. That would make the Trevi cross the earliest work in the Master’s catalogue, slightly before the Spoleto reliquaries, which the national catalogue dates to c. 1290–1310 and which Delpriori places in the first decade of the Trecento.

The shared features of the cross and the reliquaries are the gaunt hatched body, the textile treatment of the loincloth and the jewelled clarity of colour; Delpriori also sees differences, a more elegant cross with more synthetic features and white lines on the draperies, which he attributes to a different date. In De Marchi’s words, they show the same bittersweet amalgam of Cimabuesque and proto-Giottesque elements. If the attribution is correct, the Trevi cross shows the painter working on a monumental scale at the very start of his career, in the immediate wake of Assisi.

The present catalogue: secure, probable and hypothetical

Putting together what the sources allow, the catalogue of the Maestro di Sant’Alò can be described as a nucleus of three objects of secure mutual coherence and several extensions of different weight. The nucleus consists of the bifacial cross reliquary and the two tabelle from San Paolo inter vineas, now in the Museo Nazionale del Ducato at Spoleto. These are the eponymous works and are dated by the national catalogue to around 1290–1310, with a tendency to place them near 1300. The fresco fragment of an angel’s head at Santa Maria di Morro near Spoleto, proposed by Toscano in 1974 and counted by Delpriori among the master’s few works, is a modest but significant mural addition. Its present state of conservation is not described in the sources consulted. The Trevi Crucifix, given to the master by Delpriori and accepted by De Marchi, is the principal monumental work. Its earlier date in the museum’s proposal, around 1290–95, would make it the earliest of the group and would place the painter’s formation squarely in the Assisi campaigns of the late 1280s and early 1290s. The Perugia choir books are attributed to him by Delpriori’s captions and text and reported by De Marchi as a proposed connection of expressive culture; the sources consulted do not show that anyone else has taken a position, and the extension is better kept apart from the nucleus until one does. Finally, the museum in London gives a small reliquary diptych to his workshop, as discussed next.

The diptych in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inventory 19-1869 and 20-1869; each wing 24.8 by 16.5 by 4.5 centimetres, 32.8 centimetres open) is catalogued as “Master of Sant’Alò (possibly)” and dated ca. 1300–1350 in the museum’s record. The museum’s text says that its style closely resembles that of two small panels from the church of Sant’Alò at Spoleto, that the similarities suggest the two came from the same workshop, and that it was probably made near Spoleto in the 1320s, perhaps in a monastic workshop for a Benedictine monk. It was bought in 1868 from the Milanese dealer Giuseppe Baslini, and had belonged to the Spoletan collector Serafino Tordelli, who died in 1864. It is therefore a workshop attribution made by the museum, with a hedge, and not an autograph work. The sources consulted do not connect it with De Marchi’s question, and a stylistic discussion of it appears in the literature on the Primo Maestro, to which it has also been compared.

Beyond these, everything is hypothesis, and the main hypothesis concerns Montefalco. Before turning to it, it is worth stressing how thin the documentary basis is. No signature, no contract, no date painted on any of these works establishes the master’s chronology. His early date rests on stylistic comparison with Assisi and on the general placement of the reliquaries. His identity as a Spoletan rests on provenance and on style, not on any archival trace. This is normal for the Spoletan Trecento, but it means that every extension of the catalogue, and especially one reaching forward to 1333, has to be argued entirely on stylistic grounds.

Style and formation

What, then, characterises the Maestro di Sant’Alò as a painter? The sources converge on a few features. The national catalogue entries summarise the critical consensus. The master’s “peculiarity” lies in an Umbrian style in contact with manuscript illumination and with the artistic renewal of the Assisi workshops in the last twenty years of the Duecento. This dual matrix is visible in the reliquaries. They are small works of high finish, with punched borders, graffito palmettes and glass stones, whose painted saints carry the precision of the illuminator’s brush. At the same time their figures show a new weight and a narrative concentration that presuppose the upper church at Assisi. The Christus patiens of the cross, surrounded by the armed crowd of soldiers and centurions, compresses into a few centimetres the populous Calvary type that the Assisi transept had made current. In the Trevi Crucifix, as the museum entry describes it, the vibration of the garments and the hatching of the flesh in white lead belong to a refined, almost Sienese linearism that the cataloguer associates with Duccio.

Delpriori’s formula, “after Cimabue,” places the master’s formation in the immediate wake of Cimabue’s work in the transept and apse of the Upper Church, which he sees as the direct source of the Maestro delle Palazze. The Sant’Alò painter follows “a rimorchio,” in tow. He looks with attention at the Maestro della Cattura and at “the first attempts of Giotto.” In practical terms this means a painter who absorbed the new plasticity and dramatic grouping of the Assisi workshops of around 1290 without abandoning the graphic sharpness and expressive acidity of the local tradition. De Marchi’s characterisation of the master’s expressivity as “agro-dolce, contesta di acerbe assimilazioni fra cimabuesche e proto-giottesche” describes this very well. The phrase means “bittersweet, woven of unripe assimilations between the Cimabuesque and the proto-Giottesque.” It is tart rather than suave, with the new forms still green, incompletely digested and therefore particularly vivid.

On the question of sources, it is important not to project onto the Maestro di Sant’Alò the later references that shaped his successors. The influence of the Lorenzetti and of Simone Martini on Spoletan painting, so evident in the Maestro di Fossa, belongs to the 1320s and 1330s. If the Maestro di Sant’Alò was active around 1290–1310, these Sienese masters of the Lower Church can have played no part in his formation. The “Sienese” note the Trevi entry perceives is described as Duccian, not Lorenzettian or Simonesque. Likewise the Maestro di Fossa and the Maestro della Croce di Visso are later figures. If they connect with the Maestro di Sant’Alò at all, it is as part of a common Spoletan lineage, not as sources. The Maestro di Cesi is the crucial neighbour. The two painters are understood as consecutive generations: the Maestro di Sant’Alò still partly anchored in the late Duecento, the Maestro di Cesi a full Giottesque who, in De Marchi’s view, worked on the scaffolding of the Franciscan cycle itself around 1290.

The question of a development over time can be answered only provisionally. If the Trevi Crucifix belongs around 1290–95, the choir books to the second half of the 1290s and the reliquaries to the years around or after 1300, as Delpriori’s reasoning suggests, the master’s development would run from a monumental, Duccian-inflected elegance on a large scale towards the concentrated, miniaturistic intensity of the reliquaries. But the dates are too approximate, and the works too few and too different in function, to speak with confidence of a stylistic evolution. What we have is a coherent artistic temperament, not a documented career.

The Cappella di Santa Croce at Montefalco: the decoration of 1333

The chapel where the hypothesis takes us is one of the best-preserved painted ensembles of the Umbrian Trecento. It is the former presbytery of the church of Santa Croce, a small rectangular space whose walls and vault were frescoed in 1333 at the behest of Jean d’Amiel. The scheme was restored in recent years by Coo.Be.C. of Spoleto. On the end wall is a great Crucifixion with more than forty-five figures. Following an arrangement that De Marchi relates closely to Giotto’s Crucifixion in the right transept of the Lower Church at Assisi (c. 1310–1312), particularly in the detail of the swooning Virgin, the holy women support the fainting Mary on the left, the Magdalene embraces the foot of the cross, John stands on the right, and among the crowd the centurion appears on horseback.

Jean d’Amiel kneels in small scale at the foot of the cross. The right wall holds scenes of the lives of Clare and of Saint Blaise: the child Clare received by her sister Giovanna; the Virgin letting the Christ Child play with Clare; Blaise in prison; and above, Christ blessing among angels. At the centre of this wall a Gothic tabernacle, which once rose over Clare’s tomb, contains the Madonna and Child between the archangels Gabriel and Raphael. Beneath them is the defining vision, Christ planting the cross in Clare’s heart in the presence of the Blessed Giovanna.

The left wall shows the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and the death of Clare, who sits up in her bed among solicitous religious. Under the small window is an Ecce Homo, and above is Christ blessing in a mandorla, with Jean d’Amiel presented by Saint Blaise on one side and by Saint Catherine on the other. The vault carries the symbols of the Evangelists in the archaic form of a zoocephalic Tetramorph, framed by bands of scrolling foliage on a black ground. The patron thus appears three times in the cycle. A popular account notes that in one of these portraits he wears the tonsure and a yoke on his shoulders, a sign of the burdens of office.

On the altar stood a long, low dossal, now in the Vatican: 82 by 281 centimetres according to the Fondazione Zeri. At its centre is a Crucifixion surmounted by the mystic pelican, flanked on two registers by stories of Saint Blaise and Saint Catherine drawn from the Legenda Aurea. Among them is the episode of the woman who feeds the imprisoned Blaise with the very piglet he had saved, a scene repeated in the fresco on the wall.

The Vatican Museums’ account of its 2017 restoration describes the panel’s tone as “ingenuous and fairy-tale-like.” Because of the monastery’s financial difficulties the dossal was sold to the Vatican in 1927, arriving in two pieces. It was restored in 1928, again in 1970 when it was destined for the papal apartment, and once more in 2017. The last campaign treated the scratches and gouges that devout viewers had inflicted, over centuries, on the wicked figures in the martyrdom scenes. The restorers chose a watercolour puntinato reintegration that restores legibility while preserving the record of these “genuine, quarrelsome and invasive manifestations” of popular devotion.

The Vatican Museums attribute the dossal to the Primo Maestro della Beata Chiara. The Fondazione Zeri catalogue files it under the generic “Maestro di Santa Chiara da Montefalco,” with the alternative attributions “Primo Maestro della beata Chiara da Montefalco” and “Maestro di Cesi.” It was lent to the 2018 exhibition, where the dossal was presented as the extreme work of “the most Giottesque of the Spoletan painters, the Maestro di Cesi.” That attribution was based on the identification discussed below.

De Marchi’s reading of the chapel as a functioning space deserves summary, because it shows how much the two painters’ work was conditioned by its audience. The chapel was visible to the nuns through grilles. One opens in the wall facing the altar, set beneath the image of Saint Blaise in prison, “because monastic life too is a captivity”. A second opens beside the swooning Virgin in the Calvary, so that the nuns, “ideally assimilated to the sorrow of the Mother of Christ,” could look across to the tabernacle with the vision of the cross planted in Clare’s heart. Under the only window, a Christ of Pity rises from an embroidered cloth above the repository for the Eucharist. It is set between the last moments of Clare and of Saint Catherine and beneath the glorious Maiestas. The apparent fragmentation of these compositions becomes, in De Marchi’s phrase, a “lightning intensity”: a narrative that frees itself from orderly chronological storytelling and “speaks truly through images, simple and strong images.” He compares this pictorial recitative to the Jacoponic lauda.

First and Second Masters: the division of hands

From the earliest modern literature, scholars have recognised two hands in the chapel. The conventional names “Primo” and “Secondo Maestro della Beata Chiara da Montefalco” designate them. It has not been possible to verify in a primary scholarly source who coined these names and when. A non-scholarly guide reports that a Vatican panel was attributed to the Primo Maestro in a publication of 1973, which suggests the names were in use by then. That is not sufficient to name an originator, and the question is better left open than answered by invention.

The division itself is stable across scholarly, museum and local sources. The Primo Maestro is credited with the Crucifixion on the end wall, the right wall with its tabernacle, and the vault, and also with the Vatican dossal. The Secondo Maestro is credited with the left wall, the Death of Clare, the Martyrdom of Catherine and the Christ in glory with Jean d’Amiel presented by Blaise and Catherine. As De Marchi notes, he also shares the scenes of the intrados with his companion. The Fondazione Zeri records the Christ in glory among angels on the left wall under “Maestro di Santa Chiara da Montefalco” with the alternative attribution “Secondo Maestro della beata Chiara da Montefalco.” This confirms that the photographic archive retains the distinction even where it groups the material under a single heading.

The relation between the two painters is not one of master and pupil in the simple sense. In De Marchi’s description, the Secondo Maestro is the Primo’s “notevole socio” (notable partner) and a “misterioso e per nulla spregevole collaboratore” (a mysterious and by no means contemptible collaborator). The two divided the walls between them and shared the intrados. This points to a planned collaboration within a single commission, under a common programme presumably set by the patron and the community. It does not suggest subordinate execution of a master’s design.

The Primo Maestro and the Maestro di Cesi

The key development of recent scholarship concerns the Primo Maestro. The Fondazione Zeri catalogue entries for the chapel’s frescoes carry the note that “recent studies have proposed recognising in the works of the Primo Maestro della beata Chiara da Montefalco the late phase of the Maestro di Cesi.” The note cites De Marchi in the catalogue of the Terruzzi collection and Delpriori’s La scuola di Spoleto. The chapter of Delpriori’s book that treats the problem is titled with a question: “Dal Maestro di Cesi al Primo Maestro della Beata Chiara da Montefalco: un percorso unitario?” De Marchi’s introduction is unequivocal. He calls the identification of the painter with the Maestro di Cesi, author of the eponymous dossal of 1308, “per me incontrovertibile,” “for me incontrovertible,” and says it is “further corroborated in this book.”

The argument is worth reconstructing, because it shapes how the Secondo Maestro must be understood. De Marchi argues that the identity explains a series of apparent anachronisms in the chapel of 1333. These are the “festive scrolls on a black ground,” of late-Duecento taste, sparkling in the broad bands of the vault; the ancient iconography of the zoocephalic Tetramorph; and the crumpled white veil on the shoulders of the enthroned Madonna. That veil descends from Giotto’s Marian tondo on the counterfaçade of the Upper Church, painted some forty years earlier, though here it is emptied of its plastic and spatial sense.

A painter whose visual culture was forged around 1290 on the scaffolding of the Franciscan cycle would still, in 1333, “reason through iconic and blocked gestures.” In the nearby frescoes of Sant’Agostino at Montefalco, De Marchi adds, he would “inlay segments of architecture in violent and disjointed projection, like fragments resurfacing in the memory” of that decisive experience at Giotto’s side. The Maestro di Cesi’s documented points of reference make this plausible. They are the dated dossal of 1308 that gives him his name; the youthful triptych of the Death of the Virgin from the Augustinian monastery of Santa Maria della Stella (Santi Stefano e Tommaso), now in the Musée Marmottan in Paris, with its companion Christus triumphans in the Museo del Ducato; and the Marian panel from Santa Maria at Vallo di Nera, dated 1315, now in the Museo Diocesano at Spoleto; Delpriori adds the Madonna della Selvetta of 1332 and the frescoes of 1333 as dates all referred to the same path. These span a career long enough to reach 1333.

Accepting the identification has a clear consequence for the Secondo Maestro. The partner of 1333 is not a minor assistant of a younger master. He works beside an old master in the final phase of a long career, and he too, in De Marchi’s words, “seems to be of a much older formation.” The chapel then appears as the meeting of two painters both trained in the late Duecento: one the foremost Spoletan Giottesque, the other a painter of a more archaic, more acrid temperament. This is the context in which the hypothesis connecting him to the Maestro di Sant’Alò arises.

The hypothesis: is the Second Master the Maestro di Sant’Alò?

The proposal appears in a single passage of De Marchi’s introduction to Delpriori’s book. Having praised the attribution of the Trevi Crucifix to the Maestro di Sant’Alò, De Marchi asks whether we really lose track of this so characterised painter, active around 1300.

He continues, and the wording is so carefully qualified that it must be quoted rather than paraphrased: “Sarebbero necessarie alcune pezze di appoggio e un trait-d’union, ma mi chiedo, alto alto, se non possa essere lui il misterioso e per nulla spregevole collaboratore del Maestro di Cesi nella cappella della Croce del 1333, già noto come Secondo maestro della Beata Chiara da Montefalco.”

In English: “Some supporting evidence and a connecting link would be necessary, but I ask myself, in a very tentative way, whether he might not be the mysterious and by no means contemptible collaborator of the Maestro di Cesi in the chapel of the Cross of 1333, already known as the Second Master of Blessed Clare of Montefalco.”

He then gives the stylistic grounds: “Anche questo pittore, che divide pure i riquadri del sottarco col compagno, sembra di formazione ben più antica; la copiosità dei panneggi a fitte piegoline e l’acre espressività dei volti macerati discendono, direttamente o indirettamente, dal Maestro di Sant’Alò.” That is: “This painter too, who also shares the panels of the intrados with his companion, seems to be of a much older formation; the copiousness of the draperies with their dense small folds and the acrid expressiveness of the macerated faces descend, directly or indirectly, from the Maestro di Sant’Alò.”

The arguments in favour can be stated fairly from this passage and its context. The first is the convergence of formation: both painters are seen as belonging to the generation formed at Assisi around 1290. If the Primo Maestro is the Maestro di Cesi in old age, it is reasonable to look for his partner among his contemporaries rather than among younger painters. The Maestro di Sant’Alò, presented by Todini as Cesi’s immediate antecedent, is a candidate of the right generation.

The second is morphological: the abundance of drapery broken into dense small folds, and a type of face that De Marchi calls “macerated,” worn and acid. These are traits he associates with the Sant’Alò Master and recognises in the left wall at Montefalco. The third is historiographical: the Maestro di Sant’Alò’s traces seem to vanish after about 1300. The identification would solve two problems at once, giving the Sant’Alò painter a late career and the Secondo Maestro an early one. The fourth is contextual: a Spoletan commission of 1333, sponsored by the rector of the Duchy, would naturally draw on the leading painters of the city. The two most distinguished survivors of the Assisi generation would be natural candidates.

The arguments against, or at least for caution, are equally clear, and some come from De Marchi himself.

First, he states that the hypothesis would need “pezze di appoggio” and a “trait-d’union,” supporting evidence and a connecting work. No such intermediate work is known. Between a group of works dated around 1290–1310 and a fresco cycle of 1333 there is a gap of a quarter century or more with no attributed painting.

Second, his own formulation allows that the traits of the Secondo Maestro descend from the Maestro di Sant’Alò “directly or indirectly”. The second alternative, a pupil or a follower formed in his orbit, would explain the same morphological resemblances without requiring identity. In a school as closely knit as Spoleto’s, where workshop traditions were transmitted across generations and where, as De Marchi and Delpriori both stress, painters and carvers may have shared workshops, inherited types and drapery conventions are to be expected.

Third, the comparison is between very different media and scales: miniaturistic reliquaries and one large crucifix on the one hand, a mural cycle on the other. Delicate morphological comparisons across such differences are inherently uncertain.

Fourth, as far as can be determined, there is no independent published endorsement of the identification. The Fondazione Zeri catalogue continues to record the Secondo Maestro as a distinct attribution. Of Delpriori’s book only the introduction, the opening chapters and the chapter on the Maestro di Sant’Alò have been read, and they do not take up De Marchi’s suggestion; whether the chapters on the Maestro di Cesi and the Primo Maestro do is not known here. This is noted as a gap rather than presumed answered.

A further problem concerns the extended catalogue of the Secondo Maestro. Several non-scholarly descriptions of the church of Sant’Agostino at Montefalco attribute to the “second Master of Santa Chiara” the fragmentary frescoes of the triumphal arch, an Annunciation, an Agnus Dei and a Nativity, and a Madonna enthroned with saints above a procession of cripples and a possessed woman.

No scholarly source confirming these attributions has been found. They also sit uneasily with De Marchi’s own text, which assigns to the Maestro di Cesi, that is, to the Primo Maestro, the “nearby frescoes of Sant’Agostino” with their projecting architectural fragments. One popular guide even assigns the triumphal arch scenes to the fifteenth century. Until a scholarly catalogue of Sant’Agostino is available, the Secondo Maestro’s corpus outside the Santa Croce chapel should be regarded as unestablished. Any argument for identity with the Maestro di Sant’Alò therefore has to rest on the left wall and the intrados of Santa Croce alone.

An assessment

Weighing these considerations, the position taken here is as follows. The identification of the Primo Maestro with the late Maestro di Cesi is the thesis of De Marchi and Delpriori, recorded in the Fondazione Zeri catalogue, and it is treated here as a thesis resting on style rather than as a certainty. The identification of the Secondo Maestro with the Maestro di Sant’Alò, by contrast, is a hypothesis in the strict sense. It is intelligent, well grounded in a perception of style, and valuable precisely because it forces us to place the Montefalco collaborator within the Spoletan genealogy rather than treat him as an isolated provincial. But by its author’s own explicit admission it is unsupported by any connecting work. It should be cited in exactly the form in which it was proposed: as a question.

What can be affirmed with more confidence is the weaker claim embedded in the hypothesis: that the Secondo Maestro’s style descends from that of the Maestro di Sant’Alò, whether directly or through intermediaries. This is a claim about lineage, not identity, and it already has real historical consequences. It means that the Santa Croce chapel brought together the two branches of the Spoletan response to Assisi around 1290. One is the fully Giottesque branch represented by the Maestro di Cesi. The other is the more archaic, linear and acrid branch represented by the Maestro di Sant’Alò and his heirs. Seen in this light, the contrast between the two walls of the chapel is not merely a contrast between two individual temperaments. It reflects two traditions that coexisted in Spoleto for a generation and that met, at the end of their history, in the commission of a papal rector for the tomb chapel of a holy woman not yet recognised as a saint.

Chronology and open questions

The chronological framework that emerges can be summarised in prose. The relics of San Paolo inter vineas were given “tempore papae Gregorii,” either under Gregory IX in the 1230s or under Gregory X in the 1270s. The painted reliquaries that contain them are dated by stylistic criteria to around 1290–1310, and probably around 1300. The Trevi Crucifix, if correctly attributed, belongs to around 1290–95, in the wake of the Assisi campaigns of Nicholas IV, and on Delpriori’s reading the choir books of Perugia to the second half of the 1290s. The fresco fragment at Morro has no independent date. The Maestro di Cesi’s dated works are those of 1308, 1315 and 1332. The Santa Croce frescoes and, presumably, the Vatican dossal are fixed at 1333 by Jean d’Amiel’s commission. The Maestro di Fossa’s polyptych for San Francesco at Montefalco follows in 1336, according to its recovered inscription. The London diptych, the only object near the interval between about 1310 and 1330 that the sources consulted connect with the master, is dated by its museum between about 1300 and 1350, and in its text to the 1320s.

Several questions remain open, and future research should address them in a precise order. The first is documentary. The identity of “Pope Gregory” in the reliquary inscription, and the rule followed by the nuns of San Paolo around 1300, could perhaps be clarified by a fresh reading of the inscription in situ and by the archives of the successor communities at Sant’Alò and Santa Lucia in Trevi. The second is philological.

The authorship of the name “Maestro di Sant’Alò,” and of the names “Primo” and “Secondo Maestro della Beata Chiara,” should be traced to their first printed occurrences, which could not be verified. The third is catalogical. A rigorous study of the frescoes of Sant’Agostino and Santa Maria di Turrita at Montefalco, separating the hands of the Maestro di Cesi/Primo Maestro, the Secondo Maestro and later painters, is the prerequisite for any further discussion of the Secondo Maestro’s identity.

The fourth is technical. A comparative technical examination of the left wall at Santa Croce and of the Trevi Crucifix, covering underdrawing, the handling of flesh tones, and the construction of drapery folds, could test De Marchi’s morphological observations more objectively than connoisseurship alone. The fifth is the “trait-d’union” De Marchi requested: a work datable between about 1305 and 1330 that shares the features of both groups. The London diptych has been named by its museum only as a workshop product, and no source consulted offers it as that link. If such a work exists in the dispersed heritage of the Valle Umbra and Valnerina, its discovery would transform the hypothesis. If it does not, the question will probably remain where De Marchi left it: an elegant possibility, asked “alto alto.”

Conclusion

The Maestro di Sant’Alò emerges from this survey as a real and distinctive artistic personality. He was constructed on a small but coherent group of reliquaries whose provenance and inscriptions tie them to a female monastery of Spoleto. He was given art-historical substance by Bruno Toscano in 1953 and 1974, and enlarged by Alessandro Delpriori with the monumental Crucifix of Trevi and the choir books of Perugia. He is the second term in the Spoletan sequence after Cimabue, the painter who received the shock of Assisi around 1290 in a bittersweet, linear and intensely expressive idiom, and the immediate antecedent of the Maestro di Cesi.

His relationship to the frescoes of the Cappella di Santa Croce at Montefalco, by contrast, belongs to the domain of hypothesis. The Primo Maestro of 1333 is, in the thesis of De Marchi and Delpriori, the Maestro di Cesi at the end of his career. The Secondo Maestro, his partner on the left wall and the intrados, is a painter of older formation whose types descend from the Maestro di Sant’Alò. Andrea De Marchi has asked whether the two might be one, and he has asked it in terms that require supporting evidence not yet found. For now, the honest conclusion is that the chapel where Clare died preserves the meeting of two generations and two traditions of Spoletan painting. Whether it also preserves the last work of the master of the Sant’Alò reliquaries is a question that the surviving evidence allows us to ask, but not yet to answer.

It is worth recalling what kind of painter the surviving works describe. The core of the catalogue is not a set of altarpieces for a public church but a group of objects made to be held, carried and looked at from close range by a community of women. The two faces of the reliquary cross are conceived as a single programme. The recto declares the relics in writing and stages the Passion with the lance-bearer and the centurion. The verso gathers around the dead Christ the saints whose remains lie in the wood beneath the paint. Francis kneels at the foot of one face and, possibly, Clare at the other. This is the work of a painter who thought in terms of function and audience as well as of style, and the Trevi Crucifix, with its painted back made for a cross seen from both sides, suggests that he carried the same attention to the object’s use into the monumental scale. The reduction of the populous Calvary of Assisi to a few square centimetres, without loss of intensity, remains his most distinctive achievement.

His place in the history of Spoletan painting follows from the same combination. The Maestro di Sant’Alò did not break with the local Duecento: the graphic hatching of the flesh, the textile borders of the loincloths, the punched gold and the enamel-like reds belong to the language of illumination and goldsmith’s work. What he added was a new weight of figures and a capacity for grouping that presuppose the Assisi workshops after Cimabue. Delpriori’s image of a painter “in tow” of the Maestro della Cattura and of the first Giotto describes the direction of this change, and De Marchi’s “bittersweet” formula describes its temperature. His Sienese note, the “Umbrian Duccism” of the Trevi entry, is a refinement of line and not a debt to the later Lorenzetti and Simone Martini.

The way in which this personality was built is also instructive. It grew by accretion over more than a century: from the local transcription of the inscriptions in 1909, through Toscano’s rediscovery of the reliquaries in 1953 and the fresco fragment at Morro in 1974, to the Trevi Crucifix and the choir books in 2015. Each addition after 1909 rested on stylistic judgement alone. The Trevi cross itself was first listed as anonymous, then given to the Maestro della Cattura, and only then transferred to the Spoletan follower. None of this invalidates the result, since connoisseurship is the only instrument available for a territory so poor in archives. But it is a reason to keep the catalogue in tiers: a secure nucleus of three objects, a modest mural addition, a principal monumental work that is strong but not unanimously accepted, and a proposed attribution of the Perugia choir books that rests on Delpriori alone, together with a workshop piece in London.

The Montefalco hypothesis should be read against that background. Its value does not depend on whether the Secondo Maestro and the Maestro di Sant’Alò turn out to be one painter. De Marchi’s own wording, “directly or indirectly,” already allows for a pupil or a follower, and the weaker claim of lineage is enough to give the left wall of the Cappella di Santa Croce a place in the Spoletan genealogy. It shows that the archaic and acrid branch of the response to Assisi, which the reliquaries document around 1300, was still active in 1333, and that a papal rector with the pick of the region’s painters chose to set it beside the fully Giottesque manner of the Maestro di Cesi. What would turn the question of identity into an answer is exactly what De Marchi asked for, a connecting work.

For this reason the Maestro di Sant’Alò is best cited in the future in the following way. The reliquaries of San Paolo inter vineas are his core. The Trevi Crucifix is his principal monumental work, with the reservations that its condition and the earlier attributions impose. The Santa Croce chapel is a legitimate and stimulating line of enquiry, to be presented in the form of a question. The research needed to move beyond that point, set out above, is modest and concrete, and above all it means finding a work datable between about 1305 and 1330. Until some of this has been done, the Maestro di Sant’Alò is best understood for what he demonstrably is: one of the first Spoletan painters to answer the shock of Assisi, a maker of small and intensely devotional objects and of at least one great cross, and a name around which the later history of Spoletan painting can be reasonably, and carefully, arranged.