Margarito d'Arezzo

Introduction

Few figures of the Italian thirteenth century present so instructive a gap between documentary poverty and posthumous fame as the Aretine painter known to his own age as Margarito and to posterity, through the pen of his fellow-townsman Giorgio Vasari¹, as Margaritone. A third form of his name, Margarito di Magnano, derives from the single document that records him, in which he is named as the son of the late Magnano. It is the form now adopted by several museum catalogues, including that of the Vatican Museums.

The tension is fundamental. On one side stands a man attested by a single notarial act of 1262, in which he appears only as a witness and only as a painter; on the other stands the elaborate biography Vasari granted him in both the 1550 and 1568 editions of the Lives, a biography that made him a painter, sculptor and architect, credited him with the technical foundations of Italian panel painting, and buried him beneath a Latin epitaph. Between these two poles lies a body of roughly a dozen surviving panels, most of them signed with the same fixed formula:

MARGARIT(VS) DE ARITIO ME FECIT

and almost none of them securely dated. The result is a painter who is at once unusually visible, because he signed his work in an age when signatures were rare, and unusually elusive, because the works refuse to arrange themselves into a chronology.

This essay attempts to hold those poles in balance. It moves from the historical and religious context of Duecento Arezzo, through the documentary and Vasarian evidence, to a close examination of the signed works—the enthroned Virgins now in Arezzo, Washington and London, the collaborative dossal of Santa Maria delle Vertighe, and the serial images of Saint Francis²—before turning to questions of technique, to the disputed attributions of sculpture and architecture (above all the tomb of Pope Gregory X in Arezzo Cathedral), to Margarito’s position among his Tuscan contemporaries, and finally to the extraordinary swings of his critical fortune from the Renaissance to the present. Throughout, the governing principle is that of the sources: where the evidence is a signed inscription, an archival document, or a technical analysis, it is treated as such; where it is Vasari’s narrative or a modern conjecture, it is flagged accordingly, and scholarly disagreement is reported rather than concealed.

Arezzo in the Thirteenth Century: Commune, Bishopric, and the Franciscan Ascendancy

Margarito’s Arezzo was not the provincial backwater that later Florentine historiography, Vasari included, was inclined to imagine. In the thirteenth century the city was a lively centre of learning and of political ambition, home to a Studium whose statutes of 1255 make it one of the oldest universities of medieval Italy, and to a vigorous vernacular culture that produced the poet Guittone d’Arezzo (c. 1235–1294) and the scientific writer Restoro d’Arezzo, author of the encyclopaedic La composizione del mondo colle sue cascioni, composed in Aretine vernacular around 1282. It was, in short, a place where the conditions existed for an ambitious painter to build a career and to advertise his authorship.

Politically the city was Ghibelline³, and its ecclesiastical and civic life was dominated for four decades by one towering and contradictory figure, Guglielmo—more familiarly Guglielmino—degli Ubertini, bishop of Arezzo from 1248 until his death in 1289. Born to a noble Ghibelline family with strongholds in the Casentino and the Valdarno, Guglielmino combined the spiritual authority of a bishop with the temporal power of a feudal lord: he was master of numerous castles, a princeps imperii by a diploma of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1282, and a persistent adversary of the commune that contested his primacy within the city walls. His episcopate was punctuated by war, and it ended in war: on 11 June 1289, at the Battle of Campaldino, the bishop himself fell at the head of an Aretine Ghibelline army routed by the Guelph⁴ forces of Florence and its allies—a battle in whose victorious ranks Dante Alighieri is traditionally said to have served.

The bishopric’s political allegiances have been thought to leave traces in Margarito’s imagery. The distinctive imperial crown, surmounted by fleur-de-lis cusps and hung with strings of pearls and gems, worn by the Virgin in several of Margarito’s panels, has been the subject of a specific argument that must be attributed with care. As Dillian Gordon’s 2011 National Gallery catalogue records the matter, “Since Gordon noted a possible connection between Margarito’s Virgins’ crowns and Ottonian or Germanic imperial crowns, Sonia Chiodo has suggested that these crowns attest to the Aretine diocese’s political loyalties during the bishopric of Guglielmo degli Ubertini, who led Arezzo in its support of the Holy Roman Emperor.” Chiodo linked the crown-type to the imperial form visible on certain seals of the Emperor Frederick II. The same catalogue immediately tempers that political reading by observing that the fleur-de-lis crown had a local sculptural precedent already in the lunette of the Pieve of Arezzo, signed by the sculptor Marchio and dated 1216, so that by Margarito’s day the motif may have spoken as much of Aretine civic identity as of Ghibelline allegiance. The point is worth flagging as a genuine interpretative crux rather than a settled fact.

Two events of the 1270s bear directly on Margarito’s world and on the Vasarian legend. First, the presence and death of a pope: Tebaldo Visconti, elected as Gregory X after the longest conclave in the history of the Church, died at Arezzo on 10 January 1276 while returning from the Second Council of Lyon, having been hosted by Bishop Guglielmino. Gregory left in his will thirty thousand gold florins⁵ for the construction of the new cathedral, and on 9 November 1277 Bishop Guglielmino issued a decree ordering that a start be made on the work “for the honour of God, of the Blessed Virgin and of our patron St. Donatus”; the bishop then carried the building forward, raising nearly half of the present structure. Second, the consolidation of the Franciscan presence: Guglielmino protected the friars in Arezzo, consecrated the church of La Verna—the very mountain where Francis was held to have received the stigmata—and approved the founding statutes of the lay confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia⁶. This Franciscan ascendancy is the indispensable background to the most characteristic product of Margarito’s workshop, the repeated devotional image of Saint Francis.

The Documentary Margarito: A Single Name in a Cloister

Against this rich backdrop, the hard documentary evidence for the painter’s own existence shrinks to almost nothing. There is exactly one contemporary record. In 1262 a notarial act drawn up in the cloister of San Michele in Arezzo, preserved in the archive of the Camaldolese⁷ monks and published in the modern commentary to Vasari’s Lives, names him as a witness:

in claustro Sancti Michaelis coram Margarito pictore filio quondam Magnani

“in the cloister of San Michele, in the presence of Margarito the painter, son of the late Magnano.”

From this single sentence we learn everything we securely know of the biographical man: that his name was Margarito; that his father, already dead by 1262, was called Magnano (whence the form “Margarito di Magnano” preferred by some catalogues); that he lived in Arezzo; and that his profession was that of pictor, painter. Of a birth date, a death date, a training, a family of his own, there is not a trace in the documents.

The name itself is worth pausing over, because it encapsulates the distortions that Vasari’s authority imposed on later understanding. The painter signed himself Margarito; Vasari, writing nearly three centuries later, rendered the name with the augmentative suffix as “Margaritone,” and it is by this Vasarian form that he is still most widely known. The scholarly literature has increasingly reverted to the documented “Margarito,” while acknowledging that “Margaritone” is too deeply embedded to be abandoned; the two great museum catalogues of his enthroned Virgins reflect the split, the National Gallery in London cataloguing its panel under “Margarito d’Arezzo” and the National Gallery of Art in Washington under “Margaritone d’Arezzo.”

The absence of dates on the works compounds the difficulty. A fair number of panels survive, and most carry the signature; but of these only one bears a date, and that date is fragmentary and has been read in three different ways. The consequence, as the Washington catalogue frankly states, is that no secure chronology of his career has ever been established. Everything beyond the bare fact of a painter active in and around Arezzo in the third quarter of the thirteenth century is inference—inference from style, from iconography, and from the shifting authority of Vasari’s narrative. It is to that narrative that we must now turn.

Vasari’s Margarito: The Invention of a Local Hero

Margarito owes his exceptional visibility among Duecento painters to an accident of geography: he was, like Vasari, an Aretine, and Vasari devoted to him a full biography, placed in the Lives between Gaddo Gaddi and Giotto and titled, in the 1568 Giuntina edition, “Margaritone pittore, scultore et architetto aretino.” The biography is a primary source of the first importance, but it must be read as what it is—a mid-sixteenth-century construction, shaped by Vasari’s teleological scheme of the “rebirth” of art and by his evident pride in a distinguished local ancestor. Its factual content, tested against documents and surviving works, is a mixture of the demonstrably valuable, the plausible, and the demonstrably false.

Vasari frames Margarito from the outset as a painter of the old “Greek manner”—alla greca—who was alarmed by the praises being lavished on Cimabue and his disciple Giotto, and who recognized that their works were all but eclipsing his own fame. This is already a Vasarian fiction of period and rivalry: it places Margarito as a contemporary rival of Giotto, which the documents and the style make impossible, and it subordinates him to the Florentine narrative of progress.

Vasari then catalogues a long list of works: panels in tempera and frescoes covering almost the whole of the Camaldolese abbey church of San Clemente in Arezzo (which he says was later demolished under Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici); a venerated Madonna in the Chapel of the Conception in San Francesco; painted crucifixes “on the planking” in the Greek manner; a work for the nuns of Santa Margherita consisting of small scenes from the lives of the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist executed on canvas laid over panel, which Vasari marvels to find preserved after three hundred years; a signed Saint Francis “portrayed from nature” at the convent of Sargiano; a great crucifix sent to Florence to the famous Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti and, in Vasari’s day, in Santa Croce; works in San Domenico in Arezzo, a church he dates by its patrons’ arms to 1275; and frescoes in the portico of Old St Peter’s in Rome, executed, he claims, for Pope Urban IV⁸.

The most consequential of Vasari’s assertions concern matters other than painting. He tells us that Margarito, after painting the Saint Francis at Ganghereto, “gave himself to sculpture,” producing four wooden figures in a Deposition in the Pieve and figures in the round over the baptismal font in the Chapel of San Francesco, and that his sculpture improved after he saw the works of Arnolfo in Florence. He records that Margarito was the great technical innovator of panel painting: the first, in Vasari’s telling, to attend to the problem of the joins of wooden panels by covering the whole surface with a linen cloth attached with a strong glue boiled from parchment shreds and then spreading gesso over it; the inventor of relief friezes and diadems worked in gesso; and—in the words of the Lives—the man who “made borders and diadems and other rounded ornaments in relief; and it was he who invented the method of introducing bosses on which he laid gold-leaf which he afterwards burnished.”

He credits him with the design and model of the Palazzo dei Governatori at Ancona in 1270, complete with eight windows carrying Old Testament reliefs, and with the design of the church of San Ciriaco at Ancona. And, most famously, he embeds Margarito in the story of Gregory X: the Aretines, Vasari says, having received the pope’s legacy for the Vescovado begun by “maestro Lapo,” commissioned from Margarito a marble tomb for the pontiff, with the pope’s portrait executed “both in marble and in painting,” and had him carry forward the construction of the cathedral following Lapo’s design. Vasari closes with the painter’s death at the age of seventy-seven, “disgusted to have lived so long, seeing the age changed and the honours going to the new craftsmen,” his burial in a travertine tomb in the old cathedral outside Arezzo, the Latin epitaph

HIC IACET ILLE BONUS PICTURA MARGARITONUS / CUI REQUIEM DOMINUS TRADAT UBIQUE PIUS,

and the detail that the painter’s own portrait, by the hand of Spinello Aretino, survived in a scene of the Magi in the old cathedral, which Vasari says he copied before the church was pulled down.

Modern scholarship treats this rich account with systematic caution. The 1550 edition compounded the chronological confusion by stating that Margarito died in 1316; combined with the reported age of seventy-seven, that would place his birth in 1239 and his floruit decades too late, and it is precisely this Vasarian dating that fixed the long-lived characterization of the artist as a retardataire provincial.

The claims of sculptural and architectural activity are regarded as unfounded projections: the National Gallery of Art biography states flatly that “evidence to substantiate Margarito’s activity in these latter fields is, however, lacking. The only contemporary document known to us that mentions him was dated 1262 and called him ‘Margarito’ and specified his profession as painter.” The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani describes Vasari as applying to his fellow-Aretine “the Renaissance conception of the versatile artist, but without foundation according to current knowledge,” treating him almost as a genius loci. Even the celebrated technical claims, as we shall see, are contradicted in detail by scientific examination of the surviving panels. And yet Vasari’s biography remains indispensable: it preserves the memory of lost works, it records provenances and locations otherwise unknown, and it transmits the name, the epitaph, and the very fact of a signed and self-conscious Aretine master. It is a source to be mined critically, not discarded.

The Signed Panels: The Enthroned Virgins of Montelungo, Washington and London

At the core of Margarito’s surviving oeuvre stand his images of the enthroned Virgin and Child, of which three closely related versions are generally regarded as autograph: the panel from the church of Santa Maria a Montelungo, now in the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna in Arezzo; the panel in the National Gallery of Art in Washington; and the large horizontal dossal in the National Gallery in London. All three share a Byzantine-derived iconography—the frontal Virgin presenting the Child, who blesses and holds a scroll—and all three carry the painter’s signature; but they differ enough in handling to have generated a substantial debate about their relative and absolute chronology.

Madonna di Montelungo: Byzantine Gravity and Human Gesture in an Aretine Enthroned Virgin

The panel known as the Madonna di Montelungo is among the most important surviving works of Margarito d’Arezzo. It is the most concentrated statement of his conception of the enthroned Virgin. Painted in tempera and gold on a tall vertical panel, it is now in the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna in Arezzo. Along the lower edge, beneath the Virgin’s feet, runs the painter’s signature, legible in the form

MARGARIT DE ARITIO ME FEC.

This is the same formula that recurs, with minor variations, across his signed output. The inscription is more than a mark of workshop origin. In a century when Tuscan painters signed rarely, Margarito’s insistent self-naming shows a craftsman fully aware of his own authorship and of the commercial and devotional value his name could carry.

The Montelungo Madonna comes from the church of Santa Maria a Montelungo, near Terranuova Bracciolini in the Valdarno. It shows the Virgin enthroned with the Child, flanked by four diminutive standing saints arranged in two superimposed pairs. The Virgin touches the sole of the Child’s foot, a gesture of tenderness that softens the frontal solemnity of the image. The panel is signed, and it is traditionally dated to 1250 on the authority of a later inscription, recorded as seventeenth-century, which once stood in the church and read

Dei perinsignis imago a Margaritone Aretino depicta MCCL.

The date is not contemporary and cannot be treated as documentary. Several scholars have nonetheless considered it a trustworthy tradition, and a date around 1250 remains widely accepted, though it cannot be regarded as certain. Unlike the Virgin of the London dossal, the Montelungo Virgin wears no crown; her head is covered only by the veil and the dark maphorion. The balanced, linear rhythm of the composition has been connected by some scholarship with the manner of the Umbrian painter Petrus. It has also been linked to the classicizing current that in these years drew Spoletan painting toward that of Lazio.

The composition is governed by strict axial symmetry. The Virgin occupies nearly the whole height of the panel, and her gilded nimbus breaks the upper edge of the rectangle. The panel’s profile is shaped to receive it, so that the sacred head seems to press beyond the picture’s own boundary. She sits on a broad, backless throne. Its ends carry large red bolster-cushions, and its lateral supports are decorated with interlaced rosettes and ladder-like ornament. The throne reads less as a piece of furniture in space than as a heraldic frame, a flat and emblematic structure. It fixes the figure to the gold ground without suggesting depth. The result is an image of great monumentality within modest dimensions, built entirely from surface, contour and the rhythmic repetition of forms.

The Virgin herself is conceived in the idiom of the maniera greca. Her face is a long oval with almond-shaped eyes, a thin elongated nose and a small, compressed mouth. Two discs of red on the cheeks translate the Byzantine modelling of flesh into a flat, almost ornamental notation. A red veil frames the face beneath the dark mantle. The mantle falls in broad, unmodelled planes to the throne and is strewn with small light dots, a textile pattern that enlivens its sombre mass. It is edged with a narrow border that traces the outline of the figure. Beneath it, a deep red gown descends to the feet, which rest in red shoes. These red shoes are a convention of Byzantine imperial dress, and they carry into the image a quiet allusion to the Virgin’s queenly dignity. That dignity is expressed here through attire and posture rather than through a crown.

The Child is seated frontally on his mother’s lap, at the very centre of the panel. He is presented to the viewer rather than cradled. He wears a reddish tunic, raises his right hand in blessing and holds a rolled scroll in his left. The scroll is the traditional attribute of the Logos, the divine Word made flesh. His features repeat, in a smaller register, the conventions of his mother’s face, and his cross-inscribed nimbus is set against her dark mantle like a second, smaller sun. The iconographic type, with the Child held on the central axis before the Virgin’s body, descends from Byzantine models in which the Mother functions as the throne of Wisdom. Within this rigid scheme, Margarito’s single human accent is the Virgin’s hand at the Child’s foot. It is a gesture that introduces touch, and with it a note of intimacy, into an otherwise hieratic composition.

The four saints on either side are rendered at a greatly reduced scale, a clear instance of the hierarchical proportion that measures figures by their sacred rank rather than by optical logic. They stand against the gold ground without any setting, as if suspended in the celestial space the ground represents. The lower figure on the left is a mitred bishop in a red chasuble. It is tempting to identify him with Saint Donatus, bishop and patron saint of Arezzo, but no inscription confirms this, and the identification must remain a hypothesis. The other three figures, one of whom holds a book, carry no legible attributes decisive enough to name them securely. Their presence nonetheless suggests that the panel addressed a specific local community, whose protectors stand in attendance on the Queen of Heaven.

Stylistically, the Montelungo Madonna shows the qualities that define Margarito’s art at its best: a firm, continuous contour, broad fields of saturated colour, and a clarity of silhouette that makes the image legible even at a distance. There is no attempt at spatial recession or at the modelling of volume through light. Plasticity is suggested only by the drawing of the folds and by the solid, compact mass of the enthroned figures. The panel is closely related to the Madonna in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which repeats its essential scheme with small variations. Scholars remain divided on whether the Washington panel is an autograph variant or a workshop derivation of the Montelungo prototype. The comparison nonetheless confirms that the Montelungo composition served as a model within Margarito’s practice, in the same way that his images of Saint Francis were replicated to meet devotional demand.

The Montelungo Madonna thus holds a central place in the reconstruction of Margarito’s oeuvre. Its traditional date of about 1250, though not documentary, provides one of the few chronological reference points in a corpus that otherwise resists ordering. Its signature firmly anchors the attribution. Its combination of Byzantine gravity with a restrained human gesture captures precisely the balance that later criticism first misread as provincial archaism and then recognized as a coherent expressive choice. Seen against the humanizing innovations of Coppo di Marcovaldo and the spatial experiments of Cimabue, the panel may appear conservative. Seen on its own terms, it is an image of remarkable concentration, in which an Aretine master of the mid-thirteenth century shaped the inherited language of the maniera greca into a distinctly personal and enduring form.

Crown, Throne and Signature: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints in Washington

Among the signed panels of Margarito d’Arezzo, the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints in the National Gallery of Art in Washington holds a special place. It is one of only three enthroned Virgins generally recognized as belonging to his own hand or his immediate orbit. With the Montelungo Madonna in Arezzo and the London dossal, it forms the core of the painter’s Marian output. It is also one of the principal Duecento Italian paintings in an American collection. The panel is painted in tempera and gold on a tall vertical support, and like the Montelungo image its outline rises at the top to receive the Virgin’s nimbus. It repeats, with significant variations, a compositional scheme that Margarito and his workshop evidently regarded as a model. The panel therefore offers a valuable opportunity to observe how a single devotional formula could be reformulated within one master’s practice.

The Washington panel is very close to the Montelungo image, though some critics have judged it less plastic and less expressive. It is signed along its lower edge. The inscription is partly abraded, with a lacuna at its centre, but

MARGARIT and RITIO ME FECIT

remain clearly legible, and the whole is reconstructed as

MARGARIT(VS DE A)RITIO ME FECIT.

The Virgin is rigidly frontal and presents the Child on her central axis, a scheme related to the Byzantine type known as the Nikopoios, or Victory-Maker. She sits on a backless throne of a form current in the first half of the thirteenth century, and four diminutive saints hover against the gold ground around her. These saints have been identified in various ways. The most recent catalogue reasoning proposes Saint Benedict and a youthful, unidentified saint above, and below two female saints identified as Flora and Lucilla, the martyrs whose relics were venerated in Arezzo. If correct, that identification would confirm the panel’s Aretine origin.

The dating of the Washington Madonna is one of the most contested points in the literature on Margarito. Proposals have ranged from around 1235–1245 to around 1270. The National Gallery of Art’s systematic catalogue dates the panel to around 1240/1245. It argues from a reconstructed internal development of Margarito’s style and from comparison with the Sienese Master of Tressa and the Florentine Master of the Bigallo that the work belongs to an early phase of his career. A divergence of some three decades in the dating of a signed work is remarkable even by the standards of Duecento studies. It is the clearest index of how little firm chronological ground the signed panels provide. The autograph status of the panel is also not unanimously accepted: it has been suggested that it may be a workshop derivation of the Montelungo prototype rather than a fully autograph work.

The composition is governed by the same strict symmetry as the Montelungo panel. The Virgin fills almost the entire field, and her gilded nimbus projects above the rectangle of the panel, so that the head seems to rise beyond the painted surface. The nimbus is enriched with tooled decoration, including a dotted border that catches the light and sets the head apart from the ground. The throne extends across the full width of the panel. It carries broad red bolster-cushions at each end, and its lateral supports are decorated with rosettes, lattice and stepped ornament. As at Montelungo, the throne is not conceived as an object in space. It works as a flat ornamental armature that fixes the enthroned figure to the plane and gives the image its heraldic stability.

The most striking difference from the Montelungo Madonna lies in the Virgin’s attire. Here she wears a jewelled crown over her veil, rising within the nimbus and hung with strings of pearls. It is the imperial type that recurs, in its fleur-de-lis form, in the London dossal. Its possible connections with Ottonian and imperial crown-types, and with the political loyalties of the Aretine diocese, have been debated. A reading tied to the episcopate of Guglielmino degli Ubertini, however, which began in 1248, would sit awkwardly with a date in the early 1240s, a tension that illustrates how iconographic and chronological arguments bear on each other in Margarito’s case. The dark mantle covers head and body and descends to the feet, strewn with small gold sprig motifs that give the surface a precious, textile-like density. The face follows the Byzantinizing conventions of the painter: a long oval, almond eyes, a thin nose, a small mouth, and discs of red on the cheeks. At the base, the red shoes of Byzantine imperial dress appear beneath the hem.

The Child sits frontally on the Virgin’s lap, raising his right hand in blessing and holding a scroll in his left, the attribute of the divine Word. His pale, salmon-coloured tunic is modelled with fine light striations, which lend it a luminosity that contrasts with the dark mass of the mantle around him. The Virgin’s hands frame rather than embrace him. One rests at his side, and the other lies near his knee and the scroll, so that the Child is displayed to the viewer as the object of devotion rather than held in an intimate exchange. The tender gesture of the Montelungo Virgin, who touches the sole of the Child’s foot, is here less emphatic. This difference may partly explain why some critics have found the Washington panel less expressive than its Aretine counterpart.

The four small saints are distributed in two pairs against the gold ground, in keeping with the hierarchical scale that subordinates them to the enthroned group. At the upper right, a bearded figure in a black monastic habit accords well with the identification as Saint Benedict. At the upper left stands a youthful saint in a light robe, whose attributes are not sufficient for a secure identification. Below, two female saints in pale garments and veils face the throne. The combination of Benedict with Flora and Lucilla, if the identifications are correct, would sit naturally with a Benedictine context. In Arezzo the two martyrs were the titular saints of a Benedictine abbey, the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla. No documented provenance, however, links the panel to that house, and the suggestion must remain a hypothesis.

Seen beside the Montelungo Madonna, the Washington panel shows both the consistency and the flexibility of Margarito’s practice. The underlying scheme is shared: the frontal Virgin, the centrally presented Child, the backless throne, the four attendant saints, the signature at the base. Each element, however, is inflected differently: the crown, the gold-patterned mantle, the more reticent gesture, the distinct choice of saints. Whether these differences reflect an early stage in the painter’s development, as the National Gallery of Art’s catalogue maintains, or the intervention of his workshop, the panel documents a moment when an Aretine master was fixing the terms of an image he would return to repeatedly. Its unresolved chronology, far from diminishing its interest, makes it a key witness to the problems that still surround the reconstruction of Margarito’s career.

Margarito d’Arezzo’s London Dossal and the Legenda Aurea

The most ambitious and best-studied of Margarito’s enthroned Virgins is the London dossal, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints. It is one of the earliest paintings in the National Gallery’s collection. Executed in egg tempera on wood, probably poplar, it measures 92.1 by 183.1 centimetres. It retains its thirteenth-century engaged frame, made in one piece with the panel and decorated with raised roundels. The painting is signed along the base, beneath the Virgin’s feet. The inscription is now partly abraded, but it has been transcribed as

MARGARIT(VS) DE ARITIO ME FECIT.

At the centre, within a mandorla, the Virgin sits on a lion-headed throne, an allusion to the throne of Solomon and thus to divine wisdom. Two angels flank her inside the mandorla, and the symbols of the four Evangelists occupy the corners of the central field. She touches the Child’s foot, while the Child blesses and holds a scroll, the emblem of the Logos. To either side, eight narrative scenes unfold in two registers.

The architecture of the dossal is rigorously ordered. The frame, gilded and tooled, with its studding of raised roundels, encloses an inner red moulding that sets the painted field apart like a precious object within a casket. A horizontal band of dark blue ornament, filled with gold and red vine scrolls, runs across the whole width of the panel. It divides the narrative scenes into an upper and a lower register of four compartments each, two on either side of the centre. The central field rises the full height of the panel and interrupts the band. There the mandorla, outlined by a dark blue border set with red lozenge ornaments, opens like a window onto the celestial realm. The composition thus combines two modes of representation: the timeless icon at the centre and the sequential narrative at the sides, each given its own scale and its own spatial logic.

The central group repeats the scheme familiar from the Montelungo and Washington panels, but in its richest form. The Virgin wears a jewelled crown whose central fleur-de-lis cusp rises into the apex of the mandorla. Her dark mantle, strewn with red dots, covers her head and shoulders. Beneath it a red gown falls to the feet, its surface enlivened by a delicate repeat pattern. Technical examination by the National Gallery has shown that this pattern was originally painted in bright yellow orpiment and is now barely visible to the naked eye. The throne ends in two lion heads whose sinuous bodies descend to the lower corners of the mandorla. Above them lie broad red cushions. The two angels, apparently swinging censers, turn towards the throne. The eagle of Saint John is clearly legible at the upper right, and the lion of Saint Mark at the lower left.

The subjects of the eight scenes are each identified by a painted inscription above the compartment, and they are precisely documented in the National Gallery’s scholarly catalogue. They are the Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds; Saint John the Evangelist delivered unharmed from the cauldron of boiling oil; the Raising of Drusiana by Saint John; the Temptation of Saint Benedict, who casts himself into thorns to overcome lust; the Beheading of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and the carrying of her body to Mount Sinai by angels; the miracle of Saint Nicholas warning the pilgrims to cast the devil’s oil into the sea; Saint Nicholas saving three men from beheading; and the miracle of Saint Margaret, swallowed by a dragon and emerging unharmed. The predominance of scenes devoted to Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Nicholas suggests that the dossal was made for a church dedicated to one of them, possibly the church of San Niccolò in Arezzo. The London catalogue rejects the alternative identification with the nunnery of Santa Margherita, proposed on the strength of a passage in Vasari, because Vasari’s description does not match the surviving picture.

The narrative compartments are painted on a gold ground with a vivacity that contrasts with the hieratic stillness of the centre. The figures are small, energetically drawn, and arranged in compact groups. Rocks, a ship, a cauldron or a prison grille are reduced to the minimum needed to make each story legible. The selection of saints is itself significant. The two virgin martyrs Catherine and Margaret, the apostle John, the bishop Nicholas and the monastic founder Benedict together form a compact anthology of sanctity: virginity, apostleship, episcopal charity and monastic ascesis, gathered around the Mother of God. The Nativity at the upper left anchors the whole sequence in the Incarnation, which the central image presents in its eternal, iconic form.

The London dossal has also yielded the most precise argument for a date of any of Margarito’s panels. It was made by Dillian Gordon in the 2011 National Gallery catalogue of the Italian paintings before 1400. Gordon compares the painted inscriptions and iconographic details with three hagiographical texts and demonstrates that the narrative scenes depend on the Legenda Aurea of the Dominican Jacopo da Voragine⁹. The decisive detail is in the scene of Saint Nicholas saving the three condemned men.

The specification that their faces were already covered is present in the Legenda Aurea but absent from its sources, and the panel shows it. The argument rests on the date of the Legenda Aurea itself, whose compilation is generally placed in the 1260s, and on its rapid diffusion. On this basis the dossal is dated probably to 1263–4, the date the National Gallery now adopts. It is a rare instance in which a Margarito panel can be anchored, if not to a document, at least to a datable text, and it accords well with the one contemporary notice of the painter’s activity in 1262. This textual dating nonetheless stands in some tension with the earlier chronology that other scholars, extrapolating from style, have proposed for the closely related Montelungo and Washington panels. The literature has not fully resolved that tension.

The reception of the London dossal is itself a chapter in the history of taste. The panel was acquired in the neighbourhood of Arezzo by the dealers Lombardi and Baldi, and the National Gallery purchased it with the rest of their collection in 1857. The Gallery’s annual report of 1858 justified the acquisition on the ground that it served “to show the barbarous state into which art had sunk even in Italy previously to its revival”: the museum was acquiring one of its earliest pictures expressly as a specimen of decadence. A nineteenth-century history of Italian painting could concede no more than that a related panel was among the least ugly of the painter’s works. That the same object is now studied as one of the most important survivals of Duecento panel painting, and was the subject of a major campaign of conservation and technical analysis between 2019 and 2022, shows how far criticism has travelled.

The London dossal is thus the fullest expression of Margarito’s art and the most securely anchored point in its chronology. It unites in a single object the three components on which his reputation rests: the hieratic enthroned Virgin, the lively narrative of saints’ lives, and the proud signature of an Aretine master. It also shows a painter responding to the most recent devotional literature of his time. The dependence of its scenes on the Legenda Aurea places Margarito not at the margins of his culture but at its forefront, drawing on a text that was only then beginning its extraordinary circulation. Seen in this light, the dossal is not a relic of a backward provincial art but a sophisticated liturgical object, in which the ancient language of the icon and the new hagiography of the mendicant age meet on the same golden surface.

The Eight Scenes

• The Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds (upper register, first compartment)

The Nativity opens the narrative sequence and gives the whole programme its theological foundation. Placed at the upper left, the position from which the eye begins to read, it presents the historical birth of Christ, the event that the central image of the Virgin and Child translates into a timeless icon. The scene follows the Byzantine tradition that set the Nativity within a cave cut into a mountain, a formula also transmitted by the Legenda Aurea and the apocryphal gospels on which it drew.

The composition is organized around the dark silhouette of the mountain, whose peak rises to the top of the compartment. At its centre the Virgin reclines on a mattress, wrapped in her dark mantle and turned towards the viewer, her nimbus standing out against the rock. Beside her, the Child lies swaddled in the manger, watched over by the ox and the ass, according to the traditional reading of Isaiah’s prophecy that “the ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib”.

In the lower part of the scene a seated figure in red, presumably Joseph, sits apart from the Mother and Child, in the meditative isolation that Byzantine iconography reserved for him. At the upper edges, small figures of angels appear above the mountain. At the right, a standing figure turns towards them, the shepherd receiving the announcement of the birth. The juxtaposition condenses two moments of the Gospel of Luke into a single image.

The dense, rocky landscape, the reclining Virgin and the separated Joseph show how closely Margarito adhered to Byzantine models in his narrative as well as his iconic painting. The scene is compressed rather than spacious, and its forms are defined by contour and colour rather than by modelling. Its purpose is not to describe a place but to make the mystery of the Incarnation immediately recognizable, as the first chapter of the story that the saints on the dossal continue.

• Saint John the Evangelist in the Cauldron of Boiling Oil (upper register, second compartment)

The second scene is devoted to Saint John the Evangelist and illustrates the first of the two episodes of his life represented on the dossal. According to a tradition going back to Tertullian and retold in the Legenda Aurea, the Emperor Domitian had John plunged into a vessel of boiling oil before the Latin Gate in Rome. The apostle emerged unharmed and was then exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the Apocalypse.

Margarito constructs the scene with emblematic symmetry. At the centre, John sits upright in the cauldron, bearded and nimbed, raising his hands in the gesture of prayer. Directly above him, an angel spreads its great dark wings, a sign of the divine protection that renders the torture harmless. The cauldron is set on a fire whose flames lick its base, painted in bright red and orange against the gold ground.

On either side, two executioners bend towards the fire, working it with long poles or bellows to increase its heat. Behind each of them stands a compact group of onlookers, their heads packed together in the characteristic shorthand of Duecento painting for a crowd. The paired figures mirror each other across the central axis, so that the composition repeats in miniature the symmetry of the dossal as a whole.

The contrast between the serene saint and the effort of his tormentors carries the meaning of the scene. The violence directed against John is visibly futile; the angel’s presence makes the cauldron a place of manifestation rather than of death. Among the saints of the dossal, John is the only one who receives two scenes, which supports the hypothesis that the panel was made for a church in which he held a particular place of honour.

• The Raising of Drusiana (upper register, third compartment)

The third scene, to the right of the mandorla, continues the story of Saint John with his return from exile. The Legenda Aurea tells that when John came back to Ephesus after the death of Domitian, he met the funeral procession of Drusiana, a woman who had loved him and had longed for his return. He ordered her to rise and go home to prepare food for him, and she rose from the bier alive.

The composition is built on the meeting of two groups. At the centre stands John, identified by his mantle and his gesture, turning towards Drusiana. She stands before him in a white veil and garment, the colour of her shroud, already raised from the dead. The encounter between the apostle and the woman takes place at the moment of the miracle itself, the point of greatest dramatic tension.

The figures around them expand the story. At the left, members of the crowd raise their arms in astonishment. At the right, a dense group carries tall staffs or poles, recalling the bier and the funeral cortège. Small kneeling figures appear in the lower part of the compartment, perhaps the bearers or mourners overcome by what they witness. The scene is crowded, but the central pair remains legible through the clarity of its gestures.

The Raising of Drusiana presents John not as a martyr but as a wonder-worker, bringing life where there was death. Placed opposite the Nativity across the central mandorla, it pairs the birth of Christ with a resurrection wrought in his name. The two Johannine scenes, one of suffering overcome and one of death reversed, together form a small cycle within the dossal’s larger programme.

• The Temptation of Saint Benedict (upper register, fourth compartment)

The fourth scene is devoted to Saint Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism, and draws on the account in the second book of Gregory the Great’s¹⁰ Dialogues, retold in the Legenda Aurea. During his solitary life at Subiaco, Benedict was tormented by the memory of a woman he had once seen. To overcome the temptation, he stripped and threw himself into a thicket of thorns and nettles, until the pain of the flesh extinguished the fire of desire.

The landscape is dominated by a rocky cave whose dark opening occupies the centre of the compartment, recalling the Sacro Speco where Benedict lived as a hermit. At the right, among brambles rendered with dense, spiky strokes, a bearded figure crouches: Benedict enduring the thorns. Inside the cave, touches of red and orange suggest a fire.

At the left, a figure in a white garment sits near the fire; the catalogue reads it as a simpleton warming himself, a contrasting image of bodily ease set against the saint’s self-mortification. At the top of the compartment, small dark shapes appear in the air. They are consistent with the blackbird which, according to Gregory’s account, fluttered about Benedict’s face just before the temptation, a form taken by the devil. The saint drove it away with the sign of the cross.

The scene is the only one on the dossal devoted to monastic ascesis, and it gives the programme a penitential dimension beside the martyrdoms and miracles. Its inclusion may reflect a Benedictine or Camaldolese element among the patrons or the community for which the panel was made, though this cannot be demonstrated. In Margarito’s handling, the episode becomes a clear, almost diagrammatic image of the victory of the spirit over the flesh.

• The Beheading of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (lower register, first compartment)

The lower register opens with the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, one of the most popular virgin saints of the Middle Ages. According to the Legenda Aurea, Catherine was condemned by the Emperor Maxentius after she had confounded his philosophers and refused to worship the idols. The spiked wheels prepared for her were shattered by divine intervention, and she was finally beheaded. The legend adds that milk rather than blood flowed from her wound, and that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai.

Margarito combines the martyrdom and the translation of the body in a single compartment. At the centre, the executioner raises his sword above the saint, who kneels or lies at the foot of a rocky mountain, her pale figure standing out from the dark ground. At the right, a figure in a red robe with an elaborate headdress presides over the execution, presumably the emperor who ordered it.

At the top of the compartment, above the peak of the mountain, angels fly horizontally, bearing the saint’s body towards Sinai. At the left, a further winged figure seems to take part in the scene. The mountain thus serves a double function: it is the landscape of the martyrdom and, at the same time, an image of the holy mountain that will receive the relics.

The scene presents martyrdom as the entrance to glory. The brutal action of the lower part is answered by the calm flight of the angels above, and the eye rises with the saint’s body from the place of death to the sanctuary. As one of two virgin martyrs on the dossal, Catherine embodies the victory of wisdom and chastity over worldly power, a theme well suited to an image centred on the Virgin as the Throne of Wisdom.

• Saint Nicholas and the Devil’s Oil (lower register, second compartment)

The sixth scene illustrates one of the maritime miracles of Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra and protector of sailors. The Legenda Aurea tells that the devil, disguised as a pious woman, gave a group of pilgrims sailing to the saint’s church a vessel of oil, asking them to use it to anoint its walls. Saint Nicholas appeared to them in a small boat and told them to throw the vessel into the sea. When they did so, the oil burst into flame on the water, revealing its demonic origin.

The composition is filled by a ship with a tall mast and a sail marked by a lattice pattern, crowded with pilgrims whose heads are packed within the hull. A second boat appears beside it, which accords with the legend’s account of the saint appearing in a small vessel. Below, the sea is rendered as a broad dark field that anchors the compartment and contrasts with the gold of the sky.

At the upper right of the compartment a small figure in red appears, whose identification is uncertain in the present state of the panel. The painted inscription above the scene would have removed any doubt for the medieval viewer. The emphasis of the composition falls on the ship and its passengers, the protagonists of the danger from which the saint’s warning rescues them.

The miracle belongs to the genre of stories in which Nicholas protects travellers from peril, and it made him one of the most widely invoked saints of the medieval Mediterranean. Its presence on the dossal, together with the scene that follows, gives Nicholas a weight comparable to that of John the Evangelist. This is why a dedication of the original church to Nicholas remains a plausible hypothesis.

• Saint Nicholas Saves Three Men from Beheading (lower register, third compartment)

The seventh scene is the one on which the dating of the dossal chiefly rests. The Legenda Aurea tells that three innocent men had been condemned to death by a corrupt official. Saint Nicholas hastened to the place of execution, seized the executioner’s sword and freed the condemned. It is in this account that the detail of the victims’ faces being already covered appears, a detail absent from the earlier sources and faithfully represented by Margarito.

The composition moves from left to right. At the left stands the saint in his bishop’s vestments, his headdress and red cloak marking his rank. He reaches towards the executioner, who lunges forward in a short pink tunic with his sword raised. The movement of the executioner, frozen at the moment of the blow, gives the scene its dramatic tension.

At the centre, the three condemned men kneel in white garments with bowed heads, their faces covered as the text specifies. Behind them, at the right, a crowd of onlookers is gathered in a compact group, witnessing the intervention. The three kneeling figures, set in a row, form a repeated motif that the eye reads almost as a single unit, emphasizing their shared fate and shared deliverance.

The scene shows Nicholas as a defender of justice against abuse of power, a figure of episcopal authority that would have resonated in a city where the bishop held great political weight. Its fidelity to the text of the Legenda Aurea also shows the care with which the painter, or whoever devised the programme, followed his literary source.

• Saint Margaret and the Dragon* (lower register, fourth compartment)

The final scene represents the most famous episode in the legend of Saint Margaret of Antioch, virgin and martyr. Imprisoned for refusing to marry the prefect Olybrius and to renounce her faith, Margaret was attacked in her cell by the devil in the form of a dragon, which swallowed her. The sign of the cross she made caused the monster to burst open, and she emerged unharmed. Jacopo da Voragine himself, in the Legenda Aurea, reports the episode while observing that it was considered apocryphal and not to be taken seriously.

The composition is dominated by the black dragon, which fills most of the compartment. It rears up on its hind legs with its wings spread and its jaws open, the most powerful single figure among the narrative scenes. Behind it, a diagonal lattice covers the gold ground, the grille of the prison in which the episode takes place, transformed into a decorative pattern.

The saint herself is subordinated to the monster. Near the dragon’s open maw a small pale form appears, consistent with Margaret emerging from its body, though the reduced scale makes her less prominent than the beast that seeks to devour her. This inversion of scale is deliberate. It shows the overwhelming power of evil so that its defeat by a single sign of faith appears all the more miraculous.

Placed at the lower right, the scene closes the narrative sequence with an image of victory over the devil. It forms a pendant to the martyrdom of Catherine at the opposite end of the lower register: two virgin martyrs, one beheaded and one delivered, frame the lower row of scenes. Margaret was also the protector of women in childbirth, which gave her a particular relevance on an altarpiece centred on the Virgin Mother.

Two Masters, One Inscription: Margarito and Restoro d’Arezzo’s Dossal at Santa Maria delle Vertighe

The only dated work in Margarito’s corpus, and the most problematic, is the dossal of the sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Vertighe near Monte San Savino. It shows the enthroned Virgin and Child flanked by four scenes from the life of the Virgin: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi and the Assumption. The literature also refers to six unidentified saints on lateral parts of the ensemble, which do not appear in the reproduction discussed here. The panel is stylistically heterogeneous, and this heterogeneity has driven a long attributional debate. Its importance rests above all on the fragmentary inscription painted at the base of the panel:

Margaritus et Restaur[…]ecerunt hoc opus sub anno Domini MCCL[…]III m(en)se Augusti.

Two facts of real significance emerge from it.

The first is a collaboration. The inscription names two authors: Margaritus, and a second master whose name, lost in a lacuna, has been convincingly restored as Restaurus. He has been identified, on Maetzke’s reading, with Restoro d’Arezzo, the author of La composizione del mondo — an identification widely accepted but not documented. Restoro was probably also a miniaturist, and has been connected with a “Restaurus pictor” recorded in the Aretine confraternity of Santa Maria della Misericordia. The reading and the identification are due to the modern restoration and re-examination of the inscription, associated above all with the work of Anna Maria Maetzke.

On this reconstruction, the central portion of the panel, with its firmer plasticity and more calibrated composition, is the work of Margarito. The lateral scenes, close to the Coppesque mosaics of the Florence Baptistery and to Spoletan art of the 1250s, are given to Restoro, while the authorship of the saints remains unresolved. The collaboration matters because it ties Margarito to the intellectual and artistic circle of one of the most original Aretine minds of the century, and because the panel itself attests it, rather than later tradition.

The second is a date, but one that will not resolve into a single reading. The surviving letters, MCCL[…]III, have been integrated by different scholars as 1269, 1274 and 1283. The National Gallery of Art’s systematic catalogue favours 1269. It points to the panel’s reminiscences of the manner of Giunta Pisano, who is documented down to 1254, and to the presence in Arezzo during the 1260s of artists far more advanced than either Margarito or Restoro, both of which make an earlier reading within the range preferable. Others have preferred 1274 or 1283, and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani records the inscription as it stands, MCCL[…]III, without forcing a choice. On the present evidence, the Vertighe dossal can be placed only between 1269 and 1283. Whichever reading is adopted, it marks the latest securely inscribed moment of Margarito’s activity. The earlier interpretation of the picture, according to which Margarito had merely restored an older work whose lateral scenes dated from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, rested on a superficial and interpolated reading of the inscription and has been superseded.

The structure of the dossal follows the horizontal format of the London panel, but with a simpler and more monumental arrangement. The central field, rising the full height of the panel, holds the enthroned Virgin. On either side, two compartments are stacked one above the other, separated by dark horizontal bands filled with gold and red vine scrolls. Thin red borders frame each scene, and the whole is enclosed by a gilded border that has suffered losses at its edges. With four scenes rather than eight, each narrative compartment is considerably larger than those of the London dossal. The figures therefore gain in scale and presence, and the stories are told with greater amplitude.

The central Virgin departs significantly from Margarito’s other enthroned Madonnas. She is crowned, like the Virgins of Washington and London, with a jewelled crown whose fleur-de-lis cusps and pendant strings of pearls frame the face. Her dark mantle, turned back to show a red lining, falls over a dark gown strewn with small gold flowers. Unlike the frontal Child of the Montelungo, Washington and London panels, however, the Child here sits on the Virgin’s left arm and turns towards her. He wears a garment striated with gold highlights. The Virgin holds a small flowering sprig, towards which the Child’s gesture is directed. The throne carries red cushions and ornamental panels, and two dark seated lions guard its feet, a variant of the lion-throne of London that again recalls the throne of Solomon. This more intimate and less hieratic formula is one of the features that make the attribution of the central panel a matter of discussion.

The four lateral scenes are painted in a markedly different manner. The figures move with greater freedom, the draperies are drawn with livelier and more fluid lines, and the architecture and landscape settings are more elaborate than in the narrative compartments of the London dossal. Tall pinnacled buildings frame the Annunciation, a rocky cave encloses the Nativity, a stepped throne and a group of kings animate the Adoration, and an almond-shaped mandorla dominates the Assumption. This greater narrative fluency supports the attribution of the scenes to a different hand. It also accords with their stylistic proximity to the mosaics of the Florence Baptistery and to Umbrian painting of the mid-century.

The programme is entirely Marian and coherent with the dedication of the sanctuary. The scenes are arranged so that the story begins at the upper left with the Annunciation, descends to the Nativity, crosses to the Adoration of the Magi at the lower right, and rises to the Assumption at the upper right. The cycle thus runs from the Incarnation to the Virgin’s glorification. The crowned Virgin at the centre is the Queen of Heaven into which the Assumption transforms the Mother of the Nativity, so that narrative and icon explain each other. The absence of saints’ lives, which dominate the London dossal, gives the Vertighe panel a unity of theme appropriate to a sanctuary devoted to the Virgin.

The Vertighe dossal is therefore of exceptional importance for the reconstruction of Margarito’s career. It is his only dated work, it attests a documented collaboration with a painter named Restaurus, and it shows his art at its latest stage, open to a more intimate conception of the Virgin and Child. It also places him in partnership with a second master — on the accepted reading Restoro d’Arezzo, a painter and scholar whose encyclopaedic curiosity embraced the natural world and the art of his own city. Far from being a provincial workshop product, the panel emerges as the fruit of an encounter between two of the most interesting personalities of Duecento Arezzo. Its fragmentary inscription, with its unresolved date, remains one of the most eloquent documents of thirteenth-century Tuscan painting.

The Four Scenes

• The Annunciation (upper left)

The Annunciation opens the Marian cycle at the upper left of the dossal, following the account in the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38). The archangel Gabriel is sent by God to Nazareth to announce to the Virgin that she will conceive and bear the Son of God. Her consent, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord”, marks the moment of the Incarnation, the foundation of the whole programme.

At the left, Gabriel strides forward in a red mantle over a pale tunic, his great wings raised behind him and his right hand lifted in the gesture of speech. His movement across the compartment gives the scene its direction and energy. The angel enters from the space of the viewer’s left, the same side from which the eye begins to read the dossal.

The Virgin stands frontally within a tall, narrow architectural aedicule with a pitched roof, her dark mantle and golden nimbus set against its dark interior. Her hand is raised before her breast in a gesture of acceptance. At the right, in the doorway of a second building, stands a slender figure in white, often read in comparable scenes as a maidservant listening at the door, a motif of Byzantine origin.

The composition is built on a play of intervals: the open gold ground around the angel, the enclosed space of the Virgin, the second architectural frame at the right. The buildings are not coherent in space but serve to isolate and frame the figures. The scene has an elegance of line and a slender proportion that distinguish it from the more compact figures of Margarito’s own narrative scenes.

• The Nativity (lower left)

The Nativity, placed below the Annunciation, continues the story with the birth of Christ at Bethlehem. As in the London dossal, the scene follows the Byzantine tradition that set the birth within a cave in the mountainside. The tradition was transmitted by apocryphal sources and by the Legenda Aurea, which enriched the brief accounts of Luke and Matthew with details such as the ox and the ass.

The Virgin reclines at the centre on a large mattress outlined in red, wrapped in her dark mantle and turned towards the Child. He lies swaddled in a manger set within the dark opening of the cave, watched by the ox and the ass. The rocky mountain encloses the group like a mandorla of earth, while groups of angels appear at the upper left and right, adoring and announcing the birth.

In the lower part of the compartment, Joseph sits at the left, bearded and wrapped in an orange-red mantle, in the meditative isolation traditional in Byzantine iconography. At the right and in the foreground, sheep and a shepherd evoke the Annunciation to the Shepherds, so that the scene gathers several moments of the Gospel narrative into a single image. Plants and small trees scattered over the rocks enliven the landscape.

Compared with the Nativity of the London dossal, the Vertighe scene is larger, more crowded and more richly articulated. The mattress of the Virgin describes a broad curve that governs the whole composition, and the animals and figures are distributed with a narrative abundance that recalls the Baptistery mosaics of Florence. It is one of the scenes in which the hand attributed to Restoro can best be appreciated.

• The Adoration of the Magi (lower right)

The Adoration of the Magi, at the lower right, illustrates the account of the Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12). Guided by a star, the Magi come from the East to worship the newborn King of the Jews and offer him gold, frankincense and myrrh. Medieval tradition, recorded in the Legenda Aurea, made them three kings, often representing the three ages of man and the three parts of the known world.

At the left, the Virgin sits on a throne raised on a stepped base, wrapped in her dark mantle and holding the Child on her lap. The Child turns towards the kings. The group forms a stable, vertical pole at one side of the composition, towards which all the movement of the scene is directed.

The Magi approach from the right. The first, older and white-haired, kneels before the Child in a red mantle and offers his gift; a white cloth appears near him, recalling the custom of presenting offerings with veiled hands. Behind him the two younger kings stand crowned, holding their gifts in cylindrical vessels, their rich garments patterned and coloured in red and white. The progression from the kneeling to the standing figures creates a rhythmic movement towards the Virgin.

The scene presents the Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the nations, as an act of royal homage. The kings, who bear earthly crowns, bow before the Child, whose mother wears the crown of heaven at the centre of the dossal. The scene therefore anticipates the theme of queenship that the Assumption, at the upper right, brings to completion.

• The Assumption of the Virgin* (upper right)

The Assumption closes the cycle at the upper right. It represents the Virgin’s bodily elevation into heaven after her death, a belief rooted in apocryphal accounts of the Transitus Mariae and widely diffused in the Middle Ages through texts such as the Legenda Aurea. According to these traditions, the apostles were gathered around the Virgin at her death and witnessed her being taken up into glory.

At the centre of the compartment the Virgin stands frontally within a dark almond-shaped mandorla, clothed in a luminous yellow-gold robe, her arms raised in the gesture of prayer. The contrast between the dark mandorla and the golden figure makes her appear as a vision of light. Below the mandorla a long horizontal structure, decorated with ornament, suggests the tomb from which she has risen.

On either side, groups of apostles gather and turn their faces and hands towards the ascending Virgin, in attitudes of wonder and prayer. Above, small angels fly at the upper corners, accompanying her ascent, and a red form appears at the apex of the mandorla. The symmetrical arrangement of the apostles recalls the compositions of the Ascension of Christ, on which Assumption imagery was often modelled.

The Assumption brings the Marian cycle to its conclusion and explains the image at the centre of the dossal. The Virgin raised into heaven is the Queen crowned and enthroned beside the four scenes. The programme thus traces the whole trajectory of the Virgin’s life, from the moment of her consent at the Annunciation to her glorification. That trajectory suits the devotional purpose of a sanctuary dedicated to her.

The Images of Saint Francis and the Franciscan Context

If the enthroned Virgins represent Margarito’s most prestigious commissions, the images of Saint Francis of Assisi represent his most characteristic and most widely diffused product, and they place him at the very origins of Franciscan iconography. Francis died in 1226 and was canonized only two years later, in 1228. His image was still being codified in the middle decades of the century, and Margarito’s workshop played a conspicuous part in that codification. A substantial group of panels survives. Two are in the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna in Arezzo, from the convents of Sargiano and Ganghereto respectively. Further versions are in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena, the Pinacoteca Vaticana in Vatican City, the Pinacoteca Comunale of Castiglion Fiorentino, the Museo Civico of Montepulciano, and the Roman church of San Francesco a Ripa. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani also records a version in the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

The type is remarkably consistent. The panels are painted in tempera and measure roughly between one and one and a quarter metres in height and around fifty centimetres in width. It has been suggested that their tall, narrow format was designed for placement against a church pier. They show Francis standing frontally in his habit, his head covered by the cowl, a closed book in his left hand, his right hand displaying the stigmata. The image is isolated. The earliest Franciscan dossals of Bonaventura Berlinghieri, such as the signed panel of 1235 in San Francesco at Pescia, which is thought to lie behind Margarito’s iconography, surround the saint with narrative scenes of his miracles.

Margarito’s Francis is stripped of them and reduced to a single, iconic, almost portrait-like figure. Modern scholarship has stressed the realism of this conception and has related it to the physical description of the saint left by Tommaso da Celano¹¹ in the Vita Prima: the somewhat oblong face, the small flat forehead, the thin straight nose, the dark and sparse beard. Margarito’s Francis has thus been read as an attempt at a veristic effigies of the saint. In the Castiglion Fiorentino panel the saint holds a small cross in his right hand in addition to the book in his left, and a cross is also reported in the Montepulciano panel; this variant has been related to a second, Assisan archetype.

The relationships among these panels are contested and cannot be settled here: which is the prototype, which are autograph replicas, and which are workshop or follower’s copies. The Sargiano panel in Arezzo, the most famous of the signed images, entered the Aretine collection in 1872 after the suppression of the Franciscan convent. During the restoration of the 1970s, radiography carried out by the Istituto Centrale del Restauro revealed that the visible image results from a repainting, probably carried out not long after execution. The underlying figure has larger, upward-turned eyes and a shorter nose, features stylistically close to the artist’s most mature works. The rounding of the cowl proved to be a later modification and was partly removed in the course of the same restoration.

Scholars disagree about which of the Arezzo panels is autograph and which served as prototype. One line of scholarship regards the Sargiano panel as the sole autograph and the others as late-Duecento workshop replicas. Another has seen the Ganghereto panel as the true prototype from which the autograph and workshop replicas descend. A further proposal has ordered the Franciscan panels chronologically according to the manner in which the stigmata are represented, dating them between about 1240 and 1260, and has judged the San Francesco a Ripa panel in Rome to be the work of a follower rather than of the master himself. What is not in dispute is the serial character of the production: a single devotional prototype, repeatedly replicated by a workshop to meet the demand of the Franciscan churches and convents of central Italy, and almost always signed.

The Vatican panel is representative of the group and can be described precisely from the Vatican Museums’ own catalogue. It is a signed ancona of Saint Francis in tempera and gold on a fir support, measuring 127.2 by 53.9 by 6 centimetres. It entered the Pinacoteca of Pius X in 1909, having previously been kept in the Vatican Library. The Montepulciano panel was rediscovered in 1925 in a storeroom of the town’s communal archive, during the review conducted by Luigi Dami, and placed in the civic museum the following year. It is painted on a silvered ground and carries both the maker’s signature, MARG(ARI)T(VS) DE ARITIO ME FEC(IT), and the identifying inscription SANCTUS FRANCISCUS. Together the panels constitute one of the earliest and most coherent bodies of evidence for the diffusion of the cult image of Saint Francis in the generation after his canonization.

The Portrait as Icon: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis in Arezzo

The panel from the Franciscan convent of Sargiano, near Arezzo, presents Saint Francis full-length and frontally on a gold ground. It is the most famous of Margarito’s signed images of the saint and one of the clearest statements of the type his workshop made its own. The panel entered the Aretine collection in 1872, after the suppression of the convent. Its support is tall and narrow, and the figure occupies nearly its entire height, from the nimbus touching the upper edge to the bare feet resting on a dark red strip at the base.

The saint’s name is written in large capitals on either side of the head, SANCTUS at the left and FRANCISCUS at the right, divided into short vertical groups of letters. Along the lower edge runs the painter’s signature, partly abraded but legible in its opening words as

MARGARIT DE ARIT[IO].

Name of the saint and name of the painter thus enclose the figure above and below, framing it between the identification of the subject and the authentication of the maker.

The composition is of the utmost simplicity. There is no architecture, no landscape, no narrative incident: only the figure, the gold ground and the red band on which the saint stands, the one concession to a sense of place. The gold, now worn and showing its preparatory layers in many places, transforms the space around Francis into the timeless space of the icon. The vertical axis is absolute. Head, raised hand, cord and feet are aligned along it, and the broad mass of the brown habit fills the panel almost from edge to edge. This insistent frontality and isolation give the image the authority of an effigy rather than the immediacy of a story.

The head is the focal point of the panel. It is framed by the cowl, drawn up over the skull and tightly enclosing the face, and set against a darker circular nimbus. The face is long and narrow, with a small flat forehead, a thin straight nose, a small mouth, and a short, sparse beard shaded along the jaw. These features correspond closely to Tommaso da Celano’s description of the saint and give the face a physiognomic individuality rare in Duecento painting. It must be remembered, however, that the face visible today is the result of a repainting, probably carried out not long after the panel was made.

Beneath it, radiography has revealed a first version with larger, upward-turned eyes and a shorter nose. The physiognomy we see is thus a second formulation of the saint’s likeness, which suggests that the image was revised even within the lifetime of its first viewers. In both versions, the strict symmetry of the features, the sharp contours of the brows and the shadowed modelling around the eyes remain firmly within the Byzantinizing conventions of the maniera greca. The result is a paradoxical image: a portrait in intention, an icon in execution.

The gestures carry the theological message of the panel. The right hand is raised with the palm turned outward, displaying the wound of the stigmata as a small dark mark at its centre. The gesture is not one of blessing but of testimony: the saint shows the sign that made him, in the eyes of his followers, a living image of the crucified Christ. The reality of the stigmata was contested in the decades after Francis’s death and was defended in papal bulls issued by Gregory IX¹² in 1237. The insistence with which Margarito’s panels display the wound should be read against this background. The left hand holds against the chest a closed book with a red cover and metal fittings, the Gospel that Francis took as his rule of life.

The habit is rendered with a broad, rhythmic treatment of drapery. The brown fabric falls in long, parallel folds from the shoulders to the feet, articulated by lighter highlights that give it a certain volume without dissolving the flatness of the silhouette. The wide sleeves open around the hands, and the hem, edged with a thin light border, lifts slightly above the bare feet. At the waist the habit is bound by a knotted cord that hangs vertically down the centre of the figure, painted in a light, golden tone that makes it stand out against the brown. The cord and the bare feet are the two emblems of the Franciscan profession of poverty, and both are placed on the axis of the image with deliberate clarity.

The inscriptions are an integral part of the design, not an addition to it. The large capitals of the saint’s name occupy the upper part of the gold ground on either side of the head, balancing the composition and making the identification immediate even at a distance. The signature at the base, painted beneath the saint’s feet, recalls the inscriptions on Margarito’s enthroned Virgins. In a serial production destined for many churches and convents, the signature was a mark of origin and quality, guaranteeing that the image came from the workshop that had fixed its type. The repetition of the same formula across the Franciscan panels shows that the painter’s name had become part of the product itself.

The Sargiano panel occupies a central but disputed place in the series. One line of scholarship regards it as the only autograph of the Aretine images and sees the others as workshop replicas. Another considers the Ganghereto panel, also in Arezzo, to be the true prototype. Its surface must in any case be read in the light of its material history.

The restoration of the 1970s, with the radiography of the Istituto Centrale del Restauro, revealed not only the early repainting of the face but also a later rounding of the cowl, partly removed during that campaign. The present appearance of the panel is therefore the product of several successive interventions. The Sargiano Francis belongs to a group of images so close to one another that they can only be understood as variations on a single model, and the small differences between them, in the stigmata, the cowl, and the choice of book or cross, are the signs through which scholars have sought to order the series.

The Sargiano Saint Francis thus embodies the most original achievement of Margarito’s workshop. At a time when the image of the new saint was still being defined, Margarito created a type of disarming simplicity. It isolates Francis from the narrative cycles of earlier dossals, draws on the written memory of his appearance, and presents him as a living witness to the Passion. The image combines the fixity of the icon with the ambition of the portrait, and it was repeated so widely that it shaped, for a generation, the way in which central Italy saw the saint of Assisi. In this small, worn panel, the origins of one of the most influential iconographies of the Middle Ages become visible.

The Pointed Cowl: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis from Ganghereto

The panel from the Franciscan convent of Ganghereto, near Terranuova Bracciolini in the Valdarno, is the second of the two images of Saint Francis by Margarito or his workshop preserved in Arezzo. Vasari himself records a Saint Francis by the painter at Ganghereto, which gives the panel an early place in the literature on the artist. The saint stands full-length and frontally, filling the tall, narrow panel. Along the dark red band at the base, split into groups of letters by his bare feet, runs the signature, legible as

MARGARIT DE A

RITIO ME FE[CIT].

The formula is the same as on the Sargiano panel and on Margarito’s enthroned Virgins, and here it is even better preserved than on its Aretine companion.

The panel has suffered considerable losses. The ground behind the figure, bordered by a raised engaged frame, has lost most of its original surface. What remains is a worn, pinkish-grey preparation covered with a fine network of craquelure, through which only traces of the original finish can be perceived. In the present state no nimbus and no identifying inscription are legible around the head, unlike the Sargiano panel with its clearly written SANCTUS FRANCISCUS. The dark red strip on which the saint stands survives better, and it gives the figure a firm base. The damage alters the chromatic balance of the image, but it does not compromise its structure, which remains perfectly legible.

The head is the most striking element of the panel. The cowl is drawn up over the skull and ends in a long, sharp point that falls obliquely to the saint’s left, standing out against the ground like a dark crescent. The opening of the hood is outlined by a thin white line that isolates the face. Beneath it, a fringe of hair crosses the forehead. The face is long and narrow, with a thin straight nose, a small, downturned mouth and a short beard. The eyes are the dominant feature: large, wide open, with dark pupils set in the whites and fixed directly on the viewer. They give the image an intensity of gaze that distinguishes it from the more contained expression of the Sargiano face as it appears today.

The gestures follow the established type. The right hand is raised before the chest with the palm turned outward, showing at its centre the dark mark of the stigma. The left hand, emerging from the wide sleeve, holds a closed book with a red binding and a pale cover, tilted against the body. On the back of this left hand a second dark mark is visible, the stigma shown from the other side. The painter thus shows the wounds on both hands, one from the palm and one from the back. Details of this kind, such as the number and placement of the visible wounds, are among the criteria by which scholars have tried to order the Franciscan panels chronologically.

The habit is dark grey, almost black, in the present state, a tone that recalls the undyed, coarse wool worn by the early friars. The edges of the collar, the cuffs and the hem are traced with a thin white line that defines the silhouette against the ground. The folds are indicated with restraint, and the habit reads above all as a broad, compact mass that widens towards the bottom and ends in an undulating hem. At the centre, a white cord with several knots hangs from the waist, clearly visible against the dark cloth. Below the hem appear the bare feet, large and splayed outward, drawn with the toes clearly outlined and planted firmly on the red ground.

A comparison with the Sargiano panel brings out the variations within the type. At Ganghereto the habit is dark grey rather than brown, and the cowl ends in a pronounced point rather than the rounded form of the Sargiano image. The book has a pale cover in place of the richly bound volume with metal fittings. Here the wound on the back of the left hand is visible. The figure is broader and heavier, the feet larger and more emphatically placed. The eyes are wider and more staring. The Sargiano panel is more refined in its drawing and more restrained in expression. The Ganghereto panel is more direct and more insistent, qualities that can be read either as the force of a first formulation or as the simplification of a replica.

This double possibility is at the heart of the scholarly debate on the panel. One line of scholarship has regarded the Ganghereto image as the true prototype from which the other Franciscan panels descend, autograph and workshop alike. Another sees the Sargiano panel as the only autograph of the Aretine images and places the Ganghereto panel among the replicas executed by the workshop in the later Duecento. The pointed cowl is significant here, since at Sargiano the rounding of the cowl proved to be a later modification. The Ganghereto panel may therefore preserve a feature that the Sargiano image originally shared and later lost. The question remains open, and the dating of the panel, generally placed between about 1260 and 1285, reflects this uncertainty.

Whatever its position in the series, the Ganghereto Saint Francis is a powerful image and an essential witness to the diffusion of the Franciscan cult in the Valdarno. Its damaged ground and heavy forms do not diminish the force of its conception: a solitary figure, confronting the viewer with his gaze, his wounds and his book, and declaring through its signature its origin in the workshop of an Aretine master. Seen beside the Sargiano panel, it shows how a single devotional model could be repeated with variations of emphasis, colour and detail. That practice fixed the image of the saint in the churches of central Italy for a generation.

Wounds, Book and Gaze: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis in Siena

The Saint Francis in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena is one of the signed panels outside Arezzo through which the diffusion of Margarito’s Franciscan type can be followed. Generally dated around 1250, it presents the saint full-length and frontally, in the familiar formula of the series. Along the lower edge, divided by the bare feet, runs the signature, legible as

[M]ARGARIT DE A

RITIO ME[FECIT];

the initial letter and the end of the formula have been lost at the edges. The panel is now set within a plain gilded frame that appears to be a later addition. Among the surviving versions, it is one of the most completely preserved in its figure, and it offers an unusually clear view of the details on which the comparison between panels depends.

The ground behind the saint is a deep red, marked by scratches and small losses. It may represent either an original painted field or the red preparation exposed by the loss of metal leaf; without technical examination the question cannot be settled. On either side of the head, faint traces of painted letters can be discerned, presumably the remains of the saint’s name, as on the Sargiano and Montepulciano panels. No nimbus is visible in the present state. At the base, a darker band forms the ground on which the saint stands and carries the signature. The absence of any setting, as in the other panels, isolates the figure against a single, uniform field.

The head is framed by a cowl drawn up over the skull and ending in a soft, rounded peak that falls to the saint’s left. It is less sharply pointed than at Ganghereto and less regularly rounded than at Sargiano. A thin white line outlines the opening of the hood around the face. Beneath it, a fringe of hair crosses the forehead, the remnant of the tonsure. The face is long and narrow, with large, wide-open eyes whose dark pupils look directly at the viewer. The nose is thin and straight, the mouth small and downturned, and a short beard frames the jaw. The expression is grave and concentrated, and the frontal gaze gives the image an arresting immediacy.

The gestures follow the established type, rendered with particular care. The right hand is raised before the chest, palm turned outward, showing the dark mark of the stigma at its centre. The left hand holds against the body a closed book whose red binding carries a cover decorated with gold ornament, a pattern of interlace and scrolls arranged around a cruciform design. On the back of the left hand another stigma is visible. The richly ornamented book, far more elaborate than the plain volume of the Ganghereto panel, transforms the Gospel into a precious object and adds a note of liturgical dignity to an image otherwise defined by poverty.

The habit is dark grey, almost black, its folds indicated by lighter grey highlights that give the cloth a greater sense of volume than in the Ganghereto image. The collar, the cuffs and the hem are traced with a thin white line. On the right side, a broad fold of lighter grey falls down the length of the figure and introduces an unusual variation into the drapery. At the centre a white cord hangs from the waist, knotted at intervals, clearly legible against the dark cloth. Below the undulating hem the bare feet appear, and on each of them the dark mark of the stigma is clearly shown. With the wounds of both hands and both feet visible, the panel displays the stigmata more completely than either of the Aretine versions as they now appear.

A comparison with the two Arezzo panels shows how the Siena Francis combines features of both. With the Ganghereto image it shares the dark habit, the white outlines, the large staring eyes, the fringe of hair and the visible stigma on the back of the left hand. With the Sargiano image it shares the more refined drawing and the richly bound book. The cowl, rounded but asymmetrical, stands between the sharp point of Ganghereto and the regular curve of Sargiano. These combinations confirm that the panels derive from a common model, repeated with small variations that the workshop could adjust from one version to another.

The complete display of the stigmata gives the Siena panel particular relevance to the proposal to order the series chronologically according to the representation of the wounds. It also accords with the insistence, in the decades after Francis’s death, on the reality of the stigmata, which the papal bulls of Gregory IX had defended in 1237. The dating around 1250 places the panel within the range of about 1240 to 1260 proposed by that chronology, though the relative sequence of the versions remains debated, and the position of the Siena panel within it cannot be fixed with certainty. Its signature, at least, secures its origin in Margarito’s workshop.

The Siena Saint Francis is thus one of the most eloquent witnesses to the series. The complete display of the wounds, the precious book, the intense gaze and the careful drawing make it a particularly accomplished version of the type. Seen beside the panels of Sargiano and Ganghereto, it shows the coherence and flexibility of Margarito’s practice. A single image of the saint, fixed in its essential features, could be varied in colour, costume and detail while remaining immediately recognizable. It was through such images, signed and repeated, that the likeness of Francis was established in the churches of central Italy in the generation after his death.

The Cross and the Wounds: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis in Castiglion Fiorentino

The Saint Francis in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Castiglion Fiorentino is one of the most distinctive panels of Margarito’s Franciscan series. It presents the saint full-length and frontally against a gold ground, in the familiar formula of the workshop, but with a significant variation. In place of the raised, open hand that displays the stigma, the saint holds a small red cross in his right hand, while his left carries the book. Along the lower edge, divided into groups of letters by the bare feet, runs the signature, legible as

MAR[…]GARIT DE ARITIO ME FE[CIT].

The inscription confirms that this variant of the type was produced within Margarito’s own workshop.

The gold ground is well preserved in its extent, though worn and covered with a dense craquelure, through which the red preparation shows in many places. Around the head, a faint incised circle marks the outline of the nimbus, now barely distinguishable from the surrounding gold. At the top of the panel a dark strip runs across its width, and at the base a dark band forms the ground on which the saint stands and carries the signature. The gold, broader and brighter here than in the Ganghereto and Siena panels as they now survive, restores to the image something of its original splendour, setting the dark figure against a field of light.

The head is framed by a rounded cowl, drawn up over the skull and outlined around the face by a thin white line. A fringe of hair crosses the forehead beneath it. The face is long and narrow, with a thin straight nose, a small mouth and a short reddish-brown beard. The modelling is more nuanced than in the other panels of the series. Brownish shadows define the cheeks and the hollows of the eyes, and heavy lids give the gaze a grave, almost melancholy intensity. The eyes, with their dark pupils, look out towards the viewer. The face combines the physiognomic individuality that links the series to the written memory of the saint with a Byzantinizing gravity that places it firmly within the maniera greca.

The cross is the element that sets this panel apart. It is slender and red, with arms ending in expanded, pointed terminals, and its staff descends from the saint’s right hand towards the waist. Francis does not raise it as a standard or processional cross but holds it before his chest, grasping it in a closed hand. The attribute recalls the centrality of the cross in Franciscan devotion and in the saint’s own life. Its presence gives the stigmata their full meaning, since they were understood as the marks of his conformity to Christ crucified. Cross and wounds thus comment on each other.

Because the right hand no longer turns outward to display the palm, the stigmata are shown here in a different way. A dark mark appears on the back of the right hand as it grasps the cross, and another on the back of the left hand beneath the book. The book itself is bound in red and bears a cover decorated in gold with a central roundel and interlace ornament, close to the precious volume of the Siena panel. It is held against the body at an angle, its rich decoration contrasting with the plainness of the habit.

The habit is very dark, almost black with a greenish tone, and is treated as a broad, compact mass with restrained indications of folds. White lines trace the edges of the cuffs and the hem, which falls in a gently undulating line above the feet. At the centre, a white knotted cord hangs from the waist. The bare feet, broad and drawn with clearly outlined toes, rest on the dark ground at the base. On each of them the mark of the stigma is visible. With the wounds of both hands and both feet shown, the panel, like that of Siena, displays the stigmata in full, but it does so through a different arrangement of the gestures.

Within the series, the Castiglion Fiorentino panel belongs to the variant in which the saint holds a cross, a form also reported for the Montepulciano panel and related by scholars to a second, Assisan archetype. The variation shows that the workshop did not simply copy a single model but could adapt it, perhaps in response to the wishes of patrons or to different devotional traditions. The dating of the panel is uncertain, as with the rest of the series. It is generally placed around the middle of the century, and the proposal to order the panels by the representation of the stigmata gives particular weight to details such as the wounds shown on the backs of the hands. The relative sequence of the versions, however, remains open.

The Castiglion Fiorentino Saint Francis is therefore a valuable witness to the flexibility of Margarito’s workshop. It keeps all the essential features of the type: the frontal figure, the cowl, the dark habit, the knotted cord, the bare feet, the book and the signature. Through the introduction of the cross and the corresponding change of gesture, however, it gives the image a new accent. The saint is no longer only a witness showing his wounds but a follower of Christ holding the instrument of the Passion. In its well-preserved gold and carefully modelled face, the panel is one of the most accomplished versions of Margarito’s portrait of the saint.

Cross, Book and Name: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis in Montepulciano

The Saint Francis in the civic museum of Montepulciano is one of the most complete panels of Margarito’s Franciscan series. It is also one whose modern history is best recorded. It was rediscovered in 1925 in a storeroom of the town’s communal archive, during the review conducted by Luigi Dami, and was placed in the civic museum the following year. The panel presents the saint full-length and frontally, in the variant in which he holds a cross as well as the book. It carries both the identifying inscription and the painter’s signature:

SANCTUS FRANCISCUS

on either side of the head, and along the base, divided by the feet,

MARG(ARI)T DE A

R(I)TIO ME

FEC(IT).

The combination of the two texts makes it one of the most fully inscribed images in the group.

The ground has a mottled grey-silver appearance, consistent with the silvered surface recorded in the literature, now dulled and uneven with age. Around the head a nimbus is outlined by a circle of punched or dotted decoration, its field darker than the surrounding ground. The saint’s name is written in red capitals in two vertical columns: SANCTUS at the left and FRANCISCUS at the right, whose opening letters are gathered beside the nimbus. At the base, a dark red band forms the floor on which the saint stands and carries the signature in white letters. The painted surface of the figure is well preserved, and the details of face, hands and attributes remain clearly legible.

The head is framed by a brown cowl drawn up over the skull and ending in a long, sharp point that falls obliquely to the saint’s left, like the cowl of the Ganghereto panel. A thin light line outlines its opening around the face. Beneath it a fringe of hair crosses the forehead. The face is long and narrow, with a thin straight nose, a small mouth and a short beard, and dark eyes that look towards the viewer. The modelling is lively. Light strokes on the forehead, along the nose and on the cheeks give the face relief and a sense of animation, while the shadowed contours keep it within the Byzantinizing conventions of the maniera greca.

As at Castiglion Fiorentino, the saint holds a small red cross in his right hand before his chest. Its arms end in expanded, pointed terminals, and its staff descends towards the waist. The hand is closed around it rather than raised in display. The cross gives the image a particular accent. It presents Francis not only as the bearer of the stigmata but as a follower of Christ holding the instrument of the Passion, whose wounds he was believed to share. This variant has been connected by scholars to a second, Assisan archetype, distinct from the type with the raised, open hand.

The left hand holds a closed book against the body at an angle. Its red binding and light cover are decorated with a geometric ornament of lozenges and interlace, close in spirit to the precious volumes of the Siena and Castiglion Fiorentino panels. The stigmata are shown on the backs of both hands, as dark marks on the right hand grasping the cross and on the left hand beneath the book. They reappear on both bare feet at the base of the panel. The wounds are thus displayed completely, through the same arrangement of gestures as at Castiglion Fiorentino.

The habit is brown, as at Sargiano, rather than the dark grey or black of the Ganghereto, Siena and Castiglion Fiorentino panels. Its folds are modelled with lighter strokes that give the cloth a certain volume. In the lower part of the figure the habit takes on a lighter, ochre tone. Whether this reflects the original colouring or later changes in the paint layer cannot be determined from the image alone. The hem does not stop above the feet but spreads onto the ground in soft folds, partly covering them, a detail that gives the figure a greater sense of weight and presence. At the centre, a white knotted cord hangs from the waist to below the knees.

Within the series, the Montepulciano panel shares with the Castiglion Fiorentino panel the variant of the cross and the arrangement of the stigmata. It differs from it in other respects: the brown habit, the pointed cowl, the silvered ground, the punched nimbus and the fully written name of the saint. It thus combines features found separately in other versions, the brown habit and inscription of Sargiano and the pointed cowl of Ganghereto among them. These combinations confirm that the workshop worked from a stock of elements that could be assembled in different ways. The dating of the panel, like that of the whole group, remains uncertain and is generally placed around the middle of the century.

The Montepulciano Saint Francis is therefore a particularly rich example of Margarito’s Franciscan type. Its well-preserved figure, the complete inscription and signature, and the presence of the cross make it an essential witness to the variety that the workshop could introduce within a fixed model. Its rediscovery in 1925 also recalls how much of Margarito’s work re-emerged only in the early twentieth century, as interest in the “primitives” grew and the painter’s reputation began to be revised. Seen in this light, the panel belongs to the history of Margarito’s modern rediscovery as well as to that of his medieval workshop.

The Open Hand: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Saint Francis in the Pinacoteca Vaticana

The Saint Francis in the Pinacoteca Vaticana is among the best-documented panels of Margarito’s Franciscan series. The Vatican Museums catalogue it as a signed ancona in tempera and gold on a fir support, measuring 127.2 by 53.9 by 6 centimetres. Before entering the Pinacoteca founded by Pius X in 1909, it was kept in the Vatican Library. The panel presents the saint full-length and frontally on a gold ground, in the type with the raised, open right hand that Margarito’s workshop repeated in Arezzo and Siena. Its presence in the papal collections makes it one of the most widely seen of the painter’s works.

The panel has suffered significant losses. The gold ground is worn and crossed by a fine craquelure, through which the preparation shows in places. The lower part is the most damaged. The dark red band on which the saint stands is interrupted by large lacunae, especially at the lower left, where broad areas of the original surface have been lost. As a result, the signature along the base, recorded by the catalogue, survives only in fragments; a few letters, among them the concluding FEC, can still be made out near the feet. No nimbus or identifying inscription is legible around the head. A raised border, part of the original structure, runs around the edges of the panel, though it too shows losses.

The head is framed by a dark cowl drawn up over the skull and ending in a pointed tip that curves out to the saint’s left. The form is close to the cowls of Ganghereto and Montepulciano, though the point here is shorter and more hooked. A thin light line outlines the opening of the hood around the face. The face is long and narrow, with a fringe of hair across the forehead, a thin straight nose, a small mouth and a short beard. The dark eyes are set beneath strongly marked brows. The modelling, though restrained, gives the face a certain relief, and the features follow the physiognomic formula common to the series, combining a portrait-like individuality with the conventions of the maniera greca.

The gestures follow the type with the raised hand. The right hand is lifted before the chest with the palm turned outward, showing at its centre the red mark of the stigma. The left hand holds against the body a closed book with a red binding and a lighter, decorated cover. On the back of this hand a second wound is visible. As in the Siena and Ganghereto panels, the painter thus shows the stigmata of the hands from both sides, the palm of the right and the back of the left, in a single, clearly readable composition.

The habit is dark grey, almost black, with lighter grey highlights that indicate the folds. At the right, a broad fold over the knee is modelled with particular care, a motif that recalls the Siena panel. The cuffs and the hem are traced with a thin light line. At the centre, a knotted cord of light tone hangs from the waist to below the hips. The bare feet appear below the hem, resting on the damaged floor. The treatment of the habit, broad and compact but articulated by the highlights, gives the figure solidity without disturbing the flatness of its silhouette against the gold.

The support deserves attention. The catalogue identifies it as fir. Poplar was the most common wood for Tuscan panel painting of the period, so the choice of fir is worth noting. Its thickness of about six centimetres is substantial, and the raised border around the painted field is worked as part of the panel. These material characteristics are of interest for the study of workshop practice in the series. The dimensions are the largest recorded among the Franciscan panels discussed here and fall within the range of about one to one and a quarter metres in height that characterizes the group.

Within the series, the Vatican panel is closest to the versions with the raised, open hand: Sargiano, Ganghereto and above all Siena. With Siena it shares the dark habit, the modelled fold over the knee, the decorated book and the wound on the back of the left hand. With Ganghereto and Montepulciano it shares the pointed cowl. As with the other panels, its position in the chronological sequence cannot be fixed with certainty. The dating generally proposed, around the middle of the century, reflects the uncertainty that surrounds the series as a whole, and the comparison of such details remains the principal means by which scholars have tried to order it.

The Vatican Saint Francis is therefore a significant witness to the diffusion and consistency of Margarito’s Franciscan type. Despite its damaged lower portion and fragmentary signature, the figure retains all the essential features of the model: the frontal pose, the cowl, the open hand displaying the wound, the book, the knotted cord and the bare feet. Its documented material characteristics make it valuable for the study of the workshop’s practice, and its long presence in the papal collections gives it a special place in the history of the image. In the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Margarito’s portrait of the saint stands at the beginning of the long visual tradition that would culminate in the Franciscan images of Giotto and his followers.

The Roman Francis: The Saint Francis of San Francesco a Ripa and the Legacy of Margarito d’Arezzo

The panel of Saint Francis in the Roman church of San Francesco a Ripa, in Trastevere, holds a place apart in Margarito’s Franciscan series because of the site in which it is preserved. The church stands on the site of the Benedictine hospice of San Biagio, where Francis was repeatedly given hospitality during his stays in Rome. It became the first Franciscan church in the city. The panel is displayed at the altar of the Chapel of Saint Francis, a space traditionally identified with the saint’s cell and preserved within the Baroque rebuilding of the complex. There it stands at the centre of the reliquary cabinet of 1696. Its setting, surrounded by relics and associated with the saint’s own presence, has long encouraged its reputation as a “true portrait” of Francis.

That reputation should not obscure the problems of attribution and date. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani includes the panel among the replicas descending from the Ganghereto type. Another scholarly proposal, which orders the Franciscan panels by the representation of the stigmata, has judged it the work of a follower rather than of Margarito himself. No signature is visible at the base in the present state of the panel, unlike most of the other versions. The dating usually proposed, around 1275–1285, places it at the end of the series, in keeping with the view that it represents a later derivation from Margarito’s model. The claim, repeated in some popular sources, that the panel is a copy of the Vatican Saint Francis is not supported by comparison: the two images belong to different variants of the type.

The composition is framed by a painted border of red and dark geometric motifs, a series of stepped cross-shapes running around all four sides of the panel. Whether this border is original or a later addition cannot be determined from a reproduction. Within it, the gold ground occupies the central field, flanked by darker vertical bands. At the base, a dark band forms the floor on which the saint stands. Around the head, a gold nimbus is decorated with a ring of red ornament, richer than the plain or punched nimbi of the other panels. The panel’s height of 123 centimetres places it within the range of about one to one and a quarter metres that characterizes the series. The panel, with its painted border, is now set within a carved and gilded Baroque frame surmounted by a cherub’s head, probably connected with the seventeenth-century arrangement of the chapel.

The head is framed by a dark cowl drawn up over the skull, whose pointed tip falls to the saint’s left and overlaps the edge of the nimbus. Beneath it a fringe of hair crosses the forehead. The face is long and narrow, with dark eyes, a thin straight nose, a small mouth, a moustache and a short beard. The modelling is soft and the features less incisively drawn than in the Arezzo, Siena or Castiglion Fiorentino panels. The expression is gentle rather than intense, a quality that distinguishes this image within the series and may reflect the hand of a different painter or a later moment in the diffusion of the type.

As at Castiglion Fiorentino and Montepulciano, the saint holds a small red cross in his right hand, with arms ending in expanded terminals and a staff descending towards the waist. The most distinctive feature of the panel, however, is the book in his left hand. It is shown open, turned towards the viewer, and its two pages carry a text in dark letters that can be read, with some reconstruction, as

QVI VVLT VENIRE POST ME ABNEGET SEMETIPSVM ET TOLLAT [CRVCEM] SVAM.

The words are those of Christ in the Gospel (Matthew 16:24; cf. Mark 8:34 and Luke 9:23), in a variant of the Vulgate wording: “Whoever wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross.” Francis cited this verse among the Gospel passages at the opening of his Earlier Rule, the Regula non bullata. The panel thus turns the attributes into a single statement. The book proclaims the command to take up the cross, and the saint, holding the cross in his other hand and bearing the stigmata on his body, shows himself as the one who fulfilled it. Among the panels discussed here, no other version makes the programme of the image so explicit.

The stigmata are shown as dark marks on the backs of both hands and on both bare feet, following the arrangement of the versions with the cross. The habit is dark brown and treated as a broad, largely unarticulated mass, with few indications of folds. Thin light lines trace the edges of the cuffs and the hem. The hem ends in a long, curling line that spreads onto the ground at the left, a calligraphic flourish unusual in the series. At the centre, a light knotted cord hangs from the waist almost to the knees, marked by several knots at regular intervals. The simplified treatment of the drapery contrasts with the carefully modelled habits of the Siena and Vatican panels.

Within the series, the San Francesco a Ripa panel belongs to the variant with the cross, which it shares with Castiglion Fiorentino and Montepulciano, but it introduces several features of its own. These include the open book with its inscribed pages, the decorated nimbus, the painted geometric border, the curling hem and the absence of a visible signature. Together with the softer modelling of the face and the simplified drapery, these features support the view that the panel is a later derivation, produced perhaps outside Margarito’s immediate workshop, by a painter who knew the model and adapted it with some freedom. The attribution nonetheless remains open, as the conflicting scholarly opinions show.

Whatever its authorship, the San Francesco a Ripa panel is an important witness to the diffusion of the Aretine image of Francis beyond Tuscany and to its reception in Rome. Placed at the altar of the chapel that preserves the memory of the saint’s stays in the city, it came to be venerated as an authentic likeness. The belief shows how successfully Margarito’s type had established itself as the image of the saint. The panel’s history thus illustrates the power of the model created in Arezzo: repeated, varied and finally adopted in the city of the popes as the portrait of Francis himself.

The Painted Cross and Margarito among his Tuscan Contemporaries

Beyond the Virgins and the Franciscan images, the most significant survival is the painted cross from the Pieve di Santa Maria in Arezzo, which the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani counts among the artist’s most significant and expressive works. The cross is unsigned and is attributed to Margarito on stylistic grounds. After a period in the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, it has returned to the Pieve, where it is displayed in the raised presbytery.

It shows the Christus triumphans, the living, open-eyed Christ of the earlier medieval tradition, rather than the suffering Christus patiens. The DBI notes his great, intensely dark eyes and a nervous, plastic insistence on anatomy. The mourning figures of the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist flank him. The cross has been heavily cut at its terminals, of which only fragments remain, including part of a scene of the Denial of Saint Peter at the foot. Its style has been related in general terms to the Lucchese tradition of painted crosses, but far more pointedly to the art of Giunta Pisano and above all of the Florentine painter Coppo di Marcovaldo.

The proximity to works such as Coppo’s cross of 1255–1260 in San Gimignano, and to the mosaics of the Florence Baptistery, has led the DBI to date Margarito’s cross to the 1260s, though a date around 1250–1260 has also been proposed. A second painted cross, in the Chigi-Saracini collection in Siena, is also attributed to Margarito. Its blue loincloth, formed of small geometric folds and gathered in a knot just below the navel, is almost identical to that of the Pieve cross.

This network of comparisons defines Margarito’s place in the Tuscan painting of his century. His formation is generally traced to the milieu of anonymous Tuscan masters of the first half of the Duecento, such as the Florentine Master of the Bigallo and the Sienese Master of Tressa. To these are added the Aretine tradition of manuscript illumination and a body of Umbrian and Roman-Lazio references, from the Umbrian painter Petrus to Spoletan models.

In his mature and late phases he responded to the more dynamic figurative language of Spoletan painting. Through Giunta Pisano, he also responded to the classicizing tendencies of Byzantine neo-Hellenism that were spreading in Tuscany around the middle of the century. Margarito was therefore neither an isolated provincial nor a rival of Cimabue and Giotto in the Vasarian sense. He was a painter working squarely within the Italo-Byzantine maniera greca, in fruitful contact with the leading Tuscan currents of his time.

The contrast with his greater contemporaries is nonetheless real and instructive, and it explains much of his later reputation. In the Madonna del Bordone of 1261, Coppo di Marcovaldo gives the relationship between Mother and Child a new plastic weight and warmth. Margarito, for the most part, holds fast to a concentrated abstraction, a frontal, hieratic remoteness.

The central group of the Vertighe dossal, with its Child turned towards his mother, shows that he was not closed to more intimate formulas. Cimabue and, after him, Giotto were beginning to develop more convincing ideas of spatial depth and the modelling of form. Margarito remained committed to bold contour, bright and limited colour, and the clear, static legibility of image and narrative. This commitment, archaic when set beside the innovations of the last third of the century, is what made him appear a reactionary to later eyes. The crucial reinterpretation of modern scholarship, as we shall see, has been to read that archaism not as belated provincialism but as evidence of genuine chronological priority and of a distinct expressive purpose.

The Triumphant Christ: Margarito d’Arezzo’s Painted Cross from the Pieve di Santa Maria

The painted cross from the Pieve di Santa Maria in Arezzo is the principal surviving work by Margarito outside the genres of the enthroned Virgin and the image of Saint Francis. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani considers it one of his most significant and expressive works and assigns it to his mature phase. The cross carries no visible signature, so its attribution rests on stylistic grounds, notably its affinity with other works of the painter. Painted for the Pieve, the principal parish church of the city, it occupied a place of the highest liturgical prominence. It is one of the key witnesses to the development of the Tuscan painted cross in the middle decades of the thirteenth century.

The cross follows the characteristic structure of the Italian croce dipinta. At the top, a circular medallion contains a half-length figure of Christ blessing. Below it, a broad rectangular panel precedes the titulus, painted in white letters on a red ground:

IHS NAZAREN(VS) REX IVDEOR(VM).

The arms end in square terminals, each with a small figure, and the shaft ends at the foot in a rectangular panel with a narrative scene. Beside Christ’s body, the widened central panel, or apron, holds the two mourning figures. The terminals are now reduced to fragments: according to the DBI, the cross was heavily cut at its extremities, and what remains includes part of the Denial of Saint Peter at the base.

The body of Christ follows the type of the Christus triumphans, the living Christ who triumphs over death on the cross. The head is upright and the eyes are open. The arms extend horizontally along the crossbar without sagging under the weight of the body. The body itself stands straight, almost as if supported by its own legs rather than suspended from the nails. The two feet rest side by side at the base, each marked with blood. The DBI describes Christ’s very dark, extremely intense eyes and a nervous, plastic insistence on anatomy. The torso is articulated by strongly drawn divisions of the chest and abdomen, which turn anatomy into a pattern of emphatic, almost ornamental forms.

The head, framed by a gold nimbus, is the expressive centre of the cross. Dark hair falls in long locks onto the shoulders, and a short beard frames the face. The features are long and regular, and the large dark eyes look out towards the viewer with a gravity that combines serenity and sorrow. The face has none of the pathos of the dead Christ, with closed eyes and sunken head, that painters such as Giunta Pisano had made widespread in these decades. Instead, it proposes an image of divine majesty present even in suffering. This is the essence of the triumphans type, which Margarito renews through the intensity of the gaze and the physical presence of the body.

The loincloth is one of the most distinctive elements of the cross. It is white, with blue folds, and falls from the hips to the knees. Its treatment has been compared precisely with the Christus Triumphans of the Chigi-Saracini collection in Siena, now owned by Banca Monte dei Paschi and also attributed to Margarito. In both cases the loincloth is formed of small geometric folds falling unnaturally downward, gathered in a kind of belt whose drapery ends in a knot just below Christ’s navel. The comparison confirms that this motif was a recurring feature of Margarito’s painted crosses, as recognizable as the signature formula of his panels.

On either side of Christ, the apron holds the two traditional mourners. At the left stands the Virgin, wrapped in a dark mantle, her hands raised towards her face in grief. At the right stands Saint John the Evangelist in a red mantle, his head inclined and his hand raised to his cheek, a gesture of sorrow derived from Byzantine iconography. In the square terminals of the arms appear two small figures, whose identification is difficult in the present state of the panel. At the foot, the fragmentary scene of the Denial of Peter shows figures around a fire, recalling the moment in the Passion when Peter denied Christ three times. Ornamental borders in red and white run along the edges of the shaft and arms, framing the body against a dark field.

The stylistic sources of the cross have been defined with some precision. The DBI notes generic references to the tradition of the Lucchese painted crosses, together with much more precise correspondences with Giunta Pisano and above all Coppo di Marcovaldo. The proximity to works by Coppo, such as the San Gimignano cross of 1255–60, and to the mosaics of the Florence Baptistery leads the DBI to date the cross to the 1260s. Other proposals place it earlier, around 1250–1260. The cross thus shows Margarito in contact with the most advanced currents of Tuscan painting, drawing from them the plastic anatomy and linear energy of his Christ.

The Pieve cross is therefore a crucial work for understanding Margarito’s art. It shows the painter confronting the most prestigious genre of Tuscan painting in his time, and it displays an expressive range quite different from the hieratic calm of his Virgins and the portrait-like simplicity of his images of Saint Francis. By choosing the triumphant living Christ at a moment when the suffering Christus patiens was gaining ground, Margarito, or his patrons, affirmed an image of divine victory rooted in older tradition. The powerful anatomy and the intense gaze, however, reveal a painter fully aware of the innovations of his contemporaries. Despite the losses to its terminals, the cross remains one of the most impressive monuments of Duecento painting in Arezzo.

Technique: Panel, Gesso, Gold, and the Testimony of Science

Margarito’s technique has recently become the object of one of the most extensive scientific campaigns ever devoted to a thirteenth-century Italian painter—a five-year collaborative project launched in 2020 involving the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna in Arezzo, and the conservation and restoration sector of the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, culminating in an international conference held in Arezzo in October 2025 and in a monograph forthcoming in 2027. The investigations combined non-invasive methods—hyperspectral reflectance imaging, macro X-ray fluorescence scanning, macro X-ray diffraction, high-resolution digital microscopy, and infrared and Raman spectroscopy—with the targeted analysis of paint samples, and their results allow us for the first time to describe Margarito’s materials with precision, and to test Vasari’s technical claims against the physical evidence.

The results confirm a sophisticated and varied palette. For the blues Margarito used azurite and natural ultramarine, alongside an extensive use of indigo; for the yellows he made striking use of orpiment. On the London dossal in particular, as the National Gallery has reported, “an intricate repeat pattern on the Virgin’s dress, originally painted using bright yellow orpiment and now barely visible when looking at the painting with the human eye, is revealed in incredible detail through XRF scanning,” echoing a fleur-de-lis motif that recalls the cusps of the Virgin’s crown; the sea in the Saint Nicholas scene, long thought to be azurite, proved to be an indigo-containing blue swarming with fish, an octopus and a crab now visible only in the infrared; and the red of the Virgin’s dress was built from vermilion glazed with a red lake made, as high-performance liquid chromatography showed, from the lac insect. The same campaign turned up an unexpected mineral, syngenite, whose possible use as a substrate for a yellow lake became the subject of a specialist study. Traces were also found of a mecca layer—a translucent golden glaze applied over metal leaf to warm its tone—of a kind identified in other works by the painter.

Two of these findings bear directly on Vasari. First, Vasari’s insistence—that Margarito “invented the method of introducing bosses on which he laid gold-leaf which he afterwards burnished,” that is, of laying a bole ground beneath the gold—is contradicted by the London dossal, whose gold was applied directly onto the gesso with no bole layer at all; and the Washington panel proves to have been gilded not with gold but with silver leaf, patinated to imitate gold. Vasari’s technical claims, in other words, are the generalized commonplaces of a sixteenth-century painter reconstructing the origins of his craft, not accurate descriptions of Margarito’s practice.

Second, and more favourably to Vasari, the general procedure he describes—covering the panel with a linen interleaf and a thick layer of gesso before painting, and working relief ornament in gesso—does correspond to what is found on the panels: the Washington Madonna, for instance, was prepared with a fabric interleaf and a thick gesso ground before the paint and metal leaf were applied. The technical evidence thus cuts both ways, and it exemplifies the method that a responsible account of Margarito must follow: neither accepting Vasari’s assertions on authority nor rejecting them wholesale, but testing each against the surviving object. The relief ornament worked in gesso, the pastiglia of crowns and haloes, and the punched decoration of the gold—these are the genuine hallmarks of Margarito’s craft, and they connect his panels to the wider world of Duecento gilding and goldsmith’s work.

Sculpture and Architecture: The Tomb of Gregory X and the Vasarian Mirage

Nowhere is the gap between Vasari’s Margarito and the documented Margarito wider than in the fields of sculpture and architecture, and nowhere is the need for source-critical discipline greater. Vasari’s Margarito is a universal artist who carved wooden figures for the Pieve, designed the Palazzo dei Governatori and the church of San Ciriaco at Ancona, carried forward the construction of the Aretine cathedral on the design of “maestro Lapo,” and, above all, made the marble tomb of Pope Gregory X in that cathedral, with the pope’s effigy in both marble and paint. The documented Margarito is, and remains, a pictor—a painter and nothing more.

The tomb of Gregory X in the Cathedral of the Saints Peter and Donatus in Arezzo is the crux, and here recent scholarship has been decisive. The monument, which originally stood in the Chapel of San Silvestro adjacent to the apse and was moved to the beginning of the right nave in the early nineteenth century, is now unanimously denied to Margarito on both chronological and stylistic grounds.

The art historian Julian Gardner, in his study of the memorial, dates the monument on stylistic grounds to 1300–1310, and connects the roughly quarter-century gap after Gregory’s death in 1276 to Cardinal Niccolò da Prato’s revival of Gregory’s peace policy in 1303; other proposals place it more broadly in the years around 1290 to 1310, and Guido Tigler has proposed a date of 1303–1304. On any of these datings the monument postdates Margarito’s death around 1290, which makes Vasari’s attribution simply impossible.

Its forms belong to the Sienese and Arnolfian Gothic sculptural tradition, an artistic world entirely foreign to Margarito’s archaic Byzantinizing painting; Tigler attributed it in 2003 to the Sienese sculptor Gano di Fazio, returning to the monument twice in 2015 to weigh the possible participation of a second Sienese hand (Camaino di Crescentino), though the specific name should be presented as a leading modern proposal rather than an unchallenged consensus, since other authorities are content to describe it simply as an early Gothic figured tomb of Sienese character.

The chapel that first housed it was founded only in 1303, by a member of the Albergotti family, which strengthens the case for a date well after the painter’s lifetime and points to the Albergotti rather than the commune as the likely patrons. The lost painting that Vasari saw and attributed to Margaritone—an image of the pope, on the analogy of the commendatio animae fresco in the Ubertini monument in San Domenico, presenting the pontiff at the feet of the Virgin—was compromised during Gregory’s canonization process in the seventeenth century and irretrievably lost when the monument was moved; nothing survives by which the attribution could be tested, and it must be set aside as Vasarian tradition.

The wooden sculptures and the Anconitan architecture stand on no firmer ground. There is no document and no surviving, securely attributable object to substantiate any of Vasari’s claims in these fields; the Dizionario Biografico and the Washington biography agree in regarding them as without foundation. The whole edifice of Margarito the versatile master is best understood, in the words of modern criticism, as a Renaissance projection—an Aretine humanist’s need to endow his city with a founding genius loci comparable to the Florentine Cimabue, retrofitted with the sixteenth-century ideal of the artist accomplished in all three arts of design. It is a valuable witness to how the sixteenth century imagined the thirteenth, and a misleading guide to the thirteenth century itself.

Critical Fortune: From “Barbarous” to “Incantevole Caposcuola”

The history of Margarito’s reputation is one of the most dramatic reversals in the historiography of Italian art, and it is worth tracing as a subject in its own right, because it illuminates the changing criteria by which the art of the “primitives” has been judged. For Vasari, Margarito was a worthy local ancestor whose works were nonetheless “esteemed only as old things, good when art was not, as it is today, at its height”—praise and condescension in a single breath. The judgement hardened into contempt in the nineteenth century. When the National Gallery in London acquired his dossal as part of the Lombardi-Baldi collection, its annual report of 1858 justified the purchase as a demonstration of “the barbarous state into which art had sunk even in Italy previously to its revival”; the great connoisseurial history of Italian painting of the same era, by Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, could bring itself to call a related panel only “one of the least ugly paintings left by this painter.” Margarito had become the very type of the crude, provincial, pre-Giottesque painter, valued, if at all, as a foil to the glories that followed.

The turn began, curiously, in literature before it reached scholarship. In 1908 the French novelist Anatole France, in his satirical L’Île des Pingouins, made Margarito the emblem of the “primitive” beloved of a certain modern sensibility. His narrator, shown a Saint Francis by the master in the museum of Arezzo, declares in words that became a touchstone of the primitivist cult: “Je fus profondément touché ; Margaritone d’Arezzo devint, depuis ce jour, mon primitif le plus cher. Je me figure les primitifs pingouins d’après les ouvrages de ce maître” (“I was profoundly touched; Margaritone d’Arezzo became, from that day, my dearest primitive. I picture the primitive penguins after the works of this master”).

The passage is ironic—France is gently mocking the cult of the primitives even as he indulges it—but it registers a real shift of taste, the growing willingness of the early twentieth century to find in the “archaic” a positive aesthetic value rather than a mere deficiency. Serious scholarly rehabilitation followed. The first sustained monographic study, in the 1920s, began the work of defining the development of his style; and in 1928 the collector Robert Lehman could hail the Washington Madonna, then in his own collection, as “a supreme achievement of the art of the pre-giottesque period,” a work in which the painter brought “overwhelming force and grandeur to the quiet dignity and symmetry of the Byzantine tradition.”

The decisive intervention was that of Roberto Longhi, whose essay “Giudizio sul Duecento,” published in the journal Proporzioni in 1948, transformed the terms of the debate. Longhi called Margarito “un incantevole caposcuola della prima metà del secolo”—an enchanting head of a school of the first half of the century—praised the freshness and originality of his painting, and, in a hypothesis now generally regarded as untenable, cast him as the evoker of “an ancient Copto-Syriac current.”

The value of Longhi’s judgement lay less in that particular genealogy than in its reversal of the evaluative polarity: the “archaic” features of Margarito’s art were no longer to be read as signs of provincial belatedness but as marks of genuine chronological priority and of an authentic expressive power. Where an earlier orientation—represented by a group of mid-twentieth-century scholars who placed his production between about 1260 and 1290 and made him a late and mediocre follower of the Master of the Bigallo—had condemned him to the second rank, the Longhian rehabilitation pulled his beginnings back into the 1230s and his maturity to the middle of the century, and made him the leading Aretine painter of his age.

Longhi’s reappraisal set the agenda for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. The most important modern researcher on the painter, Anna Maria Maetzke, whose studies of 1973 and 1974 were bound up with the restoration and re-examination of the Aretine works, re-read the crucial inscription of the Vertighe dossal, established the collaboration with Restoro d’Arezzo, and reconstructed the sequence of the Franciscan panels; her work remains the foundation of the modern catalogue.

The definitive scholarly treatment of the London dossal, by Dillian Gordon in the National Gallery’s 2011 catalogue, anchored that panel to the Legenda Aurea and to a date around 1263–1264, giving the corpus one of its few textual footholds. And the great museum catalogues of the two overseas Virgins, together with the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani and the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, have consolidated a critical consensus that treats Margarito as a major protagonist of Tuscan Duecento painting, fundamental to the birth of Italian painting on panel. The recent scientific campaign of the 2020s, uniting London, Washington, Arezzo and Switzerland, represents the newest phase of this trajectory: a painter once acquired as a specimen of barbarism is now the object of the most advanced heritage-science analysis, his materials mapped element by element, his workshop practices reconstructed, and his art restored to the centre of the study of thirteenth-century painting.

Conclusion

Margarito d’Arezzo is a figure who compels the historian to distinguish rigorously between what is known, what is inferred, and what is invented. What is known is very little: a painter named Margarito, son of the late Magnano, active in Arezzo, attested as a witness in a single document of 1262, and the author of a group of panels signed with the formula MARGARIT(VS) DE ARITIO ME FECIT. What is inferred, from style and iconography and from the one datable text behind the London dossal, is a career unfolding in and around Arezzo in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, with beginnings that may reach back toward 1240 and a latest documented moment in the Vertighe dossal of the 1270s or early 1280s—though the internal chronology of the signed works remains genuinely unresolved, and the datings of the Washington and Montelungo Virgins in particular continue to divide scholars by decades. What is invented, or at least unfounded, is the greater part of Vasari’s Margarito: the sculptor and architect, the maker of the tomb of Gregory X—now dated on stylistic grounds to about 1300–1310 and given on good grounds to a Sienese sculptor—the technical inventor of bole gilding, the rival of Giotto. That construction tells us much about the sixteenth century and little about the thirteenth.

The panel-by-panel survey undertaken here brings one feature of that career into sharper relief than any general account can: Margarito’s production was organized as a series. The images of Saint Francis are not a set of individual inventions but variations assembled from a stock of interchangeable elements—a cowl rounded or drawn to a point, a habit brown or so dark a grey as to read almost black, a plain book or one bound in red and worked with gold interlace, a raised open palm or a closed hand grasping a small red cross, a ground of gold or of silver dulled beneath its glaze. The same is true, at a higher level of ambition, of the enthroned Virgins, where Montelungo and Washington repeat a single scheme and inflect it by the presence or absence of a crown, the choice of attendant saints, the greater or lesser warmth of the Virgin’s gesture. The signature belongs to this system rather than standing outside it. Repeated in a fixed formula across panels of very uneven quality, it functioned less as the assertion of a personality in the modern sense than as a mark of origin, guaranteeing to the Franciscan houses of central Italy that the image they had acquired came from the workshop that had fixed its type.

That recognition carries a methodological consequence which the literature has not always faced squarely. A corpus of serial replicas resists precisely the operation that art history has most persistently attempted upon it, the arrangement of the works into a developmental sequence. The criteria by which the Franciscan panels have been ordered—the manner in which the stigmata are displayed, the profile of the cowl, the degree of refinement in the drawing—are criteria that a workshop could vary at will from one commission to the next, and that a patron’s preference could override. The Sargiano panel demonstrates the difficulty in its own material: the rounding of its cowl, once a datum for comparison, proved to be a later modification, and the face on which its physiognomic subtlety was praised proved to be a repainting. Where the same form can be produced by chronological development, by a second hand in the same shop, or by an intervention two decades after the panel left it, stylistic seriation cannot bear the weight that has been placed on it. The three-decade spread in the dating of the signed Washington Madonna is not an embarrassment to be explained away but an accurate measure of what the method can and cannot deliver.

It follows that the firmest points in the chronology are those supplied from outside the works’ style, and there are only two of them. One is the notarial act of 1262. The other is the Legenda Aurea, whose terminus and rapid diffusion allow the London dossal to be placed about 1263–4—a dating that rests not on the look of the painting but on the demonstrable dependence of one of its scenes upon a detail found in Jacopo da Voragine and in none of his sources. The second of these deserves emphasis for what it says about the painter’s situation as well as his date. A workshop drawing, within two or three years of its compilation, upon the newest compendium of hagiography in Latin Christendom was not working at the back of its culture. Taken together with the collaboration recorded on the Vertighe dossal, where Margarito’s name stands beside a second signature — on the accepted reading, that of the author of La composizione del mondo — and with the wider setting of a city that possessed a Studium by 1255 and a vernacular literature of its own, the evidence points consistently in one direction: the isolation of Margarito is a retrospective fiction, and it is Vasari’s fiction before it is the nineteenth century’s.

The scientific campaign of the 2020s has added a further and more disquieting qualification, which bears on everything said above. The panels as we have them are not the panels that were made. The gold of the London dossal lies directly on the gesso; the Washington Madonna is gilded in silver patinated to pass for gold, as the Montepulciano Francis stands on a silvered ground now dulled to grey; a mecca glaze once warmed metal leaf that has since lost its tone; the Virgin’s dress in London carried a repeat pattern in orpiment that the eye can no longer see, and the sea of the Nicholas miracle teemed with fish, an octopus and a crab now legible only under infrared. To this must be added the losses recorded throughout this essay: the terminals of the Pieve cross cut away, the ground of the Ganghereto panel reduced to its preparation, the lower third of the Vatican panel lacunose and its signature reduced to a few letters, the Sargiano face overpainted within living memory of its making. Every judgement of colour, of surface, of expressive temperature that criticism has passed on Margarito—including the judgements of barbarism and the judgements of enchantment—was passed on objects in this condition.

Seen against their original function, the works recover a coherence that questions of attribution tend to obscure. These were not pictures to be looked at but instruments to be used. The tall narrow Franciscan panels, roughly a metre high and set against a church pier, presented the saint at the scale and height of a person standing; the dossals lay along altars, the London panel uniting the timeless icon at its centre with the narrative registers at its sides, the Vertighe panel tracing the Virgin’s life from Annunciation to Assumption for a sanctuary dedicated to her; the cross hung in the most conspicuous liturgical position the Pieve could offer. In that setting the insistent display of the stigmata on hands and feet is not iconographic detail but argument: the reality of the wounds was contested in the decades after Francis’s death and defended by papal bull in 1237, and a signed image that showed them plainly, repeated in convent after convent, was a position taken as much as a devotion served. The panel at San Francesco a Ripa, venerated at the altar of the cell where Francis was believed to have lodged, shows how completely the argument succeeded: a workshop type made in Arezzo came to be received in Rome as the saint’s own likeness.

What remains open is considerable, and it is better stated than glossed. The autograph status of the Washington Madonna is unsettled; the priority of Sargiano or Ganghereto within the Franciscan series is unsettled; the date of the Vertighe dossal oscillates across fourteen years between 1269 and 1283, and with it the shape of the painter’s last phase; the authorship of the outer saints on that panel is unresolved; the second cross in the Chigi-Saracini collection and the version of the Francis recorded at Zurich have received nothing like the attention given to the panels in London, Washington and Arezzo; and the political reading of the fleur-de-lis crown remains a hypothesis in tension with the early dating of the very panel that wears it. The monograph expected in 2027 from the London, Washington, Arezzo and Swiss collaboration will not settle most of these questions, since few of them are material questions. What it can do, and what the preliminary results already suggest it will do, is supply the corpus with a foundation of physical evidence—supports, grounds, pigments, gilding techniques, sequences of intervention—against which the connoisseurial proposals of the last century can at last be tested rather than merely repeated.

Between these categories, the surviving works speak for themselves with a clarity that criticism took six centuries to hear. The enthroned Virgins, frontal and hieratic beneath their imperial crowns; the painted cross with its dark-eyed triumphant Christ; and above all the serial images of Saint Francis, among the earliest and most influential cult images of the saint, iconic and quasi-veristic at once—these define a painter of real originality working confidently within the maniera greca, in contact with Coppo di Marcovaldo, with Giunta Pisano, and with the wider Byzantinizing culture of central Italy, and profiting from a workshop capable of near-industrial replication. The rehabilitation of Margarito, from the “barbarous” specimen of the Victorian gallery to the “incantevole caposcuola” of modern scholarship, is not merely a change of taste; it is a recovery of a decisive moment in the history of Italian painting on panel, the moment when a Tuscan painter began, insistently and repeatedly, to sign his name. That signature, more than any of Vasari’s fictions, is Margarito’s true monument, and it is the surest guide we have to the man behind the myth.