Simeone e Machilone

Introduction: the problem of a corpus built on four inscriptions

Few painters of the Italian Duecento are known to us on so slender a documentary foundation as Simeone and Machilone of Spoleto, and fewer still have had so much art-historical weight placed upon so little. There is no birth date for either man, no death date, no will, no tax record, no guild matriculation, no contract, no notice in any early modern life of the artists. Vasari¹ does not mention them; nor, so far as the accessible literature reveals, does any of the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century biographical tradition that shaped the canon of Italian painting. What survives instead is a handful of inscriptions — four, if one counts the one that is lost and known only at second hand — and a small, unstable body of unsigned works that successive generations of scholars have gathered around them, dispersed, and gathered again.

The four epigraphic anchors are these. A panel formerly in the cathedral of San Ciriaco at Ancona, signed by both men and dated 1230 (or 1220, depending on which strand of the documentary tradition one follows), which vanished around 1728 and is known only through a seventeenth-century manuscript that is itself now lost. A painted dossal of the Virgin and Child enthroned, signed by both men and bearing the date 1258, now in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp, where it holds the distinction of being the oldest painting in any Belgian public collection. A painted crucifix, signed by both and dated 1257 — or 1258, according to a competing reading in the literature — now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, inv. 2465. And a carved and polychromed wooden Madonna from Bugnara in the Abruzzo, inscribed with the year 1262 and signed by Machilone together with his son, now in the Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo at L’Aquila.

From these four points a career is triangulated: two painters working in partnership in the Umbrian city of Spoleto and across a wide arc of central Italy from at least 1230 until at least 1262 — a span of more than three decades — producing the standard furnishings of thirteenth-century devotion, monumental painted crosses and enthroned Madonnas, and, at the end of the documented sequence, polychromed sculpture as well. That is nearly the whole of what can be said with confidence. Everything else — the nature of their relationship to one another, the shape of their stylistic development, the extent of the unsigned corpus, the character of the workshop they ran and of the school they are thought to have founded — belongs to the domain of scholarly reconstruction, and must be marked as such.

This essay attempts that reconstruction while keeping the seams visible. Its method throughout is to distinguish four orders of claim: what the primary evidence actually says; what has become well-supported consensus among specialists; what remains a single scholar’s hypothesis; and what is simply error repeated until it has acquired the texture of fact. In a field where a lost panel recorded in a lost manuscript can generate a birth date for a career, that discipline is not pedantry but necessity.

A note on the scholars named. The modern understanding of these painters rests on a small number of decisive interventions, and this essay names only three of the figures responsible for them: Millard Meiss, whose 1937 study of the Antwerp panel opened the modern discussion and simultaneously set it off in the wrong direction; Edward B. Garrison, whose reading of the Antwerp inscription in 1949 established the two Spoletans as the authors of that painting and, with it, as historical persons with a corpus; and Cristina Ranucci, whose entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani and related studies constitute the standard synthesis. A great deal of other scholarship — on the typology of the painted cross, on Umbrian and Marchigian painting, on the Spoletan school and its diffusion — is drawn upon here, but it is summarised without attribution of individual names, in accordance with the constraints under which this essay was written. Where a view is that of one scholar rather than the field, this is stated, even when the scholar is not identified.

The names and their variants: an onomastic problem

Before the works, the names — because the names themselves have been a source of confusion, and because their forms carry historical information.

The first painter appears in the inscriptions in the Latin form Symeon or Simeon, Italianised in the literature as Simeone and, less correctly, as Simone. The second appears as Machilon or Machilonus, Italianised as Machilone. An older stratum of scholarship — the article of 1926 that first published the Barberini crucifix, the monumental 1929 study of the Italian painted cross, and the entry in Thieme–Becker — used the form Machilos, which can still be encountered in bibliographies and which sometimes causes the same artist to be indexed twice. The joint signature, in the abbreviated form in which it is generally cited, runs SYMEON ET MACHILON SPOL(etani); Garrison, publishing in French in 1949, Latinised the pair as Simeone and Machilone Spoletenses, and it is under some version of this formula that they now appear in museum catalogues and photographic archives.

The name Machilone is rare — and this rarity does real evidentiary work. It is precisely because the name is uncommon that scholarship has felt able to identify the Machilonus of the Bugnara inscription of 1262, in the Abruzzo, with the Machilon who signed alongside Simeone in Umbria and the Marches. This is an argument from onomastic improbability rather than from documentary proof, and it deserves to be labelled as such, but it is widely and reasonably accepted; one specialist study puts it bluntly, observing that the artist, whose name is rare, is without doubt the same who signed certain paintings in conjunction with Simeone. It is nonetheless an inference, not a document.

The name of Machilone’s son is a genuine crux. The Bugnara inscription preserves it only in mutilated form, conventionally transcribed as CE(P)LA(.). Some scholars have expanded this to Ceccarello, and the expansion has been repeated often enough to circulate as if it were a reading. It is not. The surviving letters do not compel the expansion, and the honest statement is that Machilone had a son who worked with him in 1262 and whose name began with the letters CE.

The variant spellings matter for a second reason: they generate confusion with other painters. Simone is among the commonest of Italian artists’ names, and the Spoletan Simeone must be kept rigorously distinct from Simone dei Crocifissi, the Bolognese painter of the fourteenth century whose very byname (derived from his production of crucifixes) invites conflation with a Duecento painter of crosses; from Simeone Ciburri, a Perugian active between 1591 and 1624; from Simone de Magistris, a Marchigian painter of the sixteenth century whose regional sphere overlaps with that of the Spoletans; and, most obviously, from Simone Martini. None of these conflations appears in the specialist literature, but all of them appear in general reference works and online compilations, and the essayist writing on the Duecento Spoletans should expect to encounter them.

One further onomastic observation bears on the central unresolved question of the partnership. In the two joint signatures whose order is recorded — the lost Ancona panel and, so far as the abbreviated transcriptions indicate, the Antwerp dossal — Simeone’s name precedes Machilone’s. The Dizionario Biografico describes the situation with precision: Machilone is documented from 1230, the year in which he placed his signature immediately after that of a certain Simeone. Whether this priority reflects seniority, greater share in the commission, alphabetical or metrical accident, or simple habit cannot be determined. It is tempting to read it as evidence that Simeone was the elder or the master and Machilone the junior partner — a reading that would accord neatly with the fact that Machilone alone survives into the documented record of 1262, by then working with a son of his own. Tempting, but unproven: the temptation should be registered and resisted.

What is and is not known about the two men

The biographical section of any account of these painters is necessarily short, and the honest version of it is shorter still than most published summaries suggest.

• Documented with certainty

Two painters named Simeone and Machilone, identified in their inscriptions as Spoletans, signed a work jointly in 1230 (or 1220) for, or at least destined for, the cathedral of Ancona. They signed a Madonna dossal jointly, dated 1258, now in Antwerp. They signed a painted crucifix jointly, dated 1257 or 1258, now in Rome. Machilone signed, with a son, a polychromed wooden Madonna dated 1262, in the Abruzzo. Their self-identification as Spoletani in the signatures is the primary evidence for their origin: it is the painters’ own claim, made in the most public and durable form available to them.

• Consensus, well supported but not documentary

That the two were active principally in Spoleto and its ecclesiastical hinterland; that they were among the leading painters of Umbria in the central decades of the thirteenth century; that their formation lay in the Byzantinising tradition of Spoletan painting inherited from the twelfth century; that they were in contact, direct or mediated, with Pisan painting of the Giuntesque type.

• Undocumented and frequently asserted

That Simeone and Machilone were father and son. That they were brothers. That either was the other’s pupil. None of these relationships appears in any surviving source. The sources that describe their association describe it in the neutral language of partnership — Simeone as Machilone’s compagno, his companion or associate. The single documented family relationship in the entire dossier is Machilone’s fatherhood of the son named in the Bugnara inscription, and that son is not Simeone.

This is worth dwelling upon, because the assumption of kinship is pervasive in popular accounts and occasionally slips into serious ones. It arises, one suspects, from a modern difficulty in imagining a durable artistic partnership between unrelated men in the thirteenth century, and from the analogy of the Bugnara inscription, where a father-and-son team is explicitly named. But the analogy cuts the other way: the Bugnara inscription demonstrates that when a filial relationship existed, the formula EI FILIUS was available and was used. Its absence from the joint signatures of Simeone and Machilone is not proof that they were unrelated, but it removes the only ground on which kinship might have been asserted.

• A career of thirty-two years

If the 1230 date of the Ancona panel is accepted, the joint activity of the two painters spans at minimum the years 1230 to 1258, and Machilone’s individual activity extends at least to 1262 — thirty-two years from first to last document. Should the alternative date of 1220 for the Ancona panel prove correct, the span widens to forty-two years. Either figure is long but entirely plausible for a medieval workshop; neither tells us the painters’ ages at any point. A man who signed a major cathedral commission in 1230 was presumably not a beginner; a man still working, with an adult son, in 1262 was presumably not young. Beyond that, silence.

Spoleto in the thirteenth century: the setting of a workshop

The city that these painters claimed as their own in their signatures had, within living memory of their grandparents, been destroyed. On 27–28 July 1155, Frederick Barbarossa² burned Spoleto in punishment for its resistance to imperial authority. The city’s political fortunes never fully recovered from that catastrophe, and the thirteenth century in Spoleto is a history of accommodation with larger powers rather than of independent expansion. A commune is documented from 1173. In 1198 Innocent III³ asserted papal sovereignty over the duchy; Frederick II recognised that sovereignty in 1213, and Spoleto thereafter belonged to the Papal State.

The consequences of this history for the visual arts are not straightforward, and it would be a mistake to read the painters’ careers as a simple function of the city’s politics. But two structural features of thirteenth-century Spoleto bear directly on the question of how a workshop like theirs could operate across such a wide territory.

The first is the extraordinary geographical extent of the Spoletan diocese. The see projected eastward and southward across the Apennines, toward the central and southern Marches — Camerino, Visso, Ascoli — toward the district of Rieti, and into the Abruzzo, reaching Teramo and the region of L’Aquila. This is not a footnote to ecclesiastical administration; it is the infrastructure of artistic circulation. A painter established in Spoleto, working for churches and religious communities within the diocesan network, had access by right of association to an arc of commissions running from the Marchigian coast to the mountains of the Abruzzo. When we find a signed work by these painters in the cathedral of Ancona in 1230 and another, by Machilone and his son, at Bugnara in the Abruzzo in 1262, we are not looking at exceptional long-distance commissions but at the ordinary reach of a Spoletan workshop operating within the territory to which Spoleto’s church was connected.

The second feature is the character of patronage in an Umbrian city of the mid-Duecento. The documented patrons of the works in question are of three kinds. There is the individual lay donor: at the foot of the Barberini crucifix kneels a woman, named in the inscription as domina Maria, portrayed in the attitude of prayer — a patroness whose social position the title domina indicates without specifying. There are the religious communities: the Orvietan crucifix attributed to the pair is associated with the Poor Clares⁴ of San Lorenzo delle Vigne, and the Franciscan⁵ orbit is everywhere present in the region in these decades. And there are the confraternities: the Orvietan Madonna attributed to the painters belonged to the Confraternita del Carmine. Cathedral chapters complete the picture, since the lost Ancona panel stood in the choir of the canons.

This range — a private woman, a female religious community, a lay confraternity, a cathedral chapter — is characteristic of the Duecento market and tells us something about the workshop’s economic base. It did not depend on a single great patron. It produced objects of standard type for a diversified clientele across a wide territory: crucifixes for church naves and rood beams, dossals and Madonnas for altars and confraternity chapels, and, at least once, a polychromed statue for a rural church. That is the profile of a successful provincial atelier, not of a court artist.

It should be added that the thirteenth century in Umbria was, in artistic terms, anything but provincial in the pejorative sense. The construction and decoration of the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, begun in 1228, drew painters from Tuscany, Rome, and further afield into the region and made central Umbria one of the most concentrated sites of artistic activity in Italy. Spoleto lies some thirty kilometres south of Assisi. Whatever else may be said of the milieu in which Simeone and Machilone worked, it was not isolated.

The Spoletan inheritance: Alberto Sotio and the Byzantinising tradition

The stylistic starting point for any account of these painters is the local tradition into which they were born. Spoleto possessed, in the decades before their birth, a painter of genuine distinction: Alberto Sotio, whose signed and dated painted cross of 1187 survives in the cathedral of Spoleto. The cross is one of the earliest firmly dated painted crosses in Italy and one of the monuments of twelfth-century Umbrian painting.

Scholarship has consistently located the formation of Simeone and Machilone in contact with this inheritance, characterising their art as rooted in a deeply felt Byzantinism — a sentito bizantinismo — of Spoletan derivation, and identifying in their work stylistic features of late Comnenian type. The terminology repays a moment’s attention. “Late Comnenian” designates the phase of Byzantine art associated with the final decades of the Comnenian dynasty in the twelfth century, characterised by elongated proportions, linear articulation of drapery in fine gold or light striations, severe and schematised facial types, and a highly codified system for the rendering of features. These conventions reached Italy through multiple channels — mosaic workshops, imported icons, illuminated manuscripts, and the movement of craftsmen — and they constituted, for much of the thirteenth century, the default vocabulary of Italian panel painting, the style that later criticism would label the maniera greca.

The point to be made about Simeone and Machilone is that their Byzantinism is not a general Italian phenomenon but a specific local one. It arrives by way of Spoleto, through the tradition of which Sotio’s cross is the outstanding surviving monument, and it retains Spoletan peculiarities — in the handling of the mourning figures on the cross terminals, in the physiognomic types, in certain compositional habits — that distinguish it from the Byzantinism of Pisa, or Lucca, or Rome.

Onto this local base a second influence is grafted, and here the scholarship is unanimous: the painted crosses of Giunta Pisano. Giunta is the decisive figure in the history of the Italian painted cross in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the painter chiefly associated with the shift from the Christus triumphans type — Christ erect, open-eyed, alive upon the cross — to the Christus patiens, the suffering Christ with closed eyes and body curved in a pronounced sinuous arc. His documented activity includes a cross commissioned in 1236 by Brother Elias⁶ for the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, and surviving signed crosses associated with Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi and with San Domenico in Bologna.

The Barberini crucifix of Simeone and Machilone stands squarely within this Giuntesque orbit, and the specific comparisons proposed in the literature are worth recording. The 1929 study of the Italian painted cross proposed the Santa Maria degli Angeli cross as the model for the general conception, and the lost Assisi cross of 1236 — which included a portrait of the kneeling Brother Elias at the foot of the cross — as the likely precedent for the kneeling donor figure of domina Maria. A later reading, published in 1998, preferred a comparison with Giunta’s San Domenico cross in Bologna, observing that in the Spoletan work the physiognomic harshness and anatomical schematism of the Pisan model are softened.

These are not incompatible proposals; they describe different aspects of a single relationship. What both establish is that by the late 1250s the Spoletan workshop was working in full awareness of the dominant Pisan model for the painted cross, and was adapting rather than merely copying it. The softening noted in 1998 is a genuine observation about the character of the Spoletan version: where Giunta’s Christ is an instrument of ascetic intensity, the Spoletan Christ is handled with a certain moderating temperance. Whether this reflects a deliberate choice, a local preference, or simply a lesser painter’s inability to sustain Giunta’s severity is a question of judgement on which the literature does not speak with one voice.

The first anchor: the lost panel of Ancona

The earliest fixed point in the career of Simeone and Machilone is also the most fragile, and it deserves to be examined with particular care, because a great deal depends upon it and almost nothing about it can now be verified.

A panel signed by both painters stood in the cathedral of San Ciriaco at Ancona, in the choir of the canons. It bore, according to the tradition, the signature

SIMEON ET MACHILON SPOLETANI

and the date 1230. It was recorded by Giovanni Pichi Tancredi, a seventeenth-century Anconitan writer, in a manuscript entitled Anconologia. The panel disappeared from the cathedral around 1728. The manuscript that recorded it is itself now lost.

This is a double loss, and its epistemological consequences should be stated plainly. Our knowledge of the earliest signed work of these painters rests on a modern scholarly tradition reporting the content of a manuscript that no living scholar has read, describing a painting that no living scholar has seen. The chain has at least two irrecoverable links. This does not make the testimony worthless — seventeenth-century local antiquarians were often careful recorders of inscriptions, and there is no obvious motive for invention in the case of two painters whose names carried no prestige — but it does mean that every element of the record is, in principle, subject to transmission error.

And indeed the record is not internally consistent. The date is given as 1230 in the tradition followed by Garrison in 1949 and by the Dizionario Biografico entry of 2006; but a Marchigian regional survey published in 1929 gives the date as 1220, relaying the same Pichi Tancredi tradition. A ten-year discrepancy in a career whose total documented span is thirty-two years is not a trivial matter. The Treccani Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale entry on Spoleto adds a further complication by stating that the panel was recorded in 1669 — presumably a reference to the date of Pichi Tancredi’s notice rather than to the panel itself, but the formulation has caused confusion.

The subject of the panel is likewise uncertain. The sources variously describe a Deposition and a Crucifixion. These are not the same subject, though they are adjacent, and one can see how a summary description might have slid from one to the other in transmission — or how a modern reader might have compressed a fuller description into an approximate label.

What, then, can be salvaged? Three things, held with appropriate looseness. First, that the two painters were working in partnership by the third decade of the thirteenth century, whether from 1220 or 1230, and were therefore already established a generation before the securely dated works of the late 1250s. Second, that they were working, at this early date, on a commission of significant standing: a panel in the canons’ choir of a cathedral is not a minor object. Third, that they were already working outside Spoleto and across the Apennines, in the Marches, at the beginning of their documented activity — which, given the diocesan geography discussed above, is less surprising than it might appear, but which nonetheless establishes the pattern of long-distance practice that the Bugnara commission of 1262 would confirm at the other end of their careers.

The honest conclusion is that the Ancona panel should be cited as evidence of an early joint activity in the 1220s or 1230s, with the date given as disputed, and that any argument requiring the precise year of 1230 should be flagged as resting on a contested reading of a lost record of a lost work.

Signed at the Virgin’s Feet: The Antwerp Dossal of Simeone and Machilone of Spoleto

The Antwerp panel is a horizontal dossal of the type widely diffused in central Italy in the middle decades of the thirteenth century: an altar-panel in which a hieratic image occupies the centre and narrative compartments are disposed at the sides. Here the central field, much the largest, holds the Virgin and Child enthroned, while two narrow lateral columns each contain two superimposed scenes from the life of the Virgin, separated from the centre and from one another by plain red bands that act as painted framing. The four episodes are

1. the Birth of the Virgin (upper left),
2. the Annunciation (lower left),
3. the Nativity of Christ (lower right) and
4. the Assumption (upper right).

Read chronologically, the cycle therefore runs down the left column and up the right, so that the sequence closes in the uppermost register with the Virgin’s glorification. Whether or not this circular itinerary was consciously planned, its effect is to place the beginning and the end of Mary’s earthly story at the same height, level with her enthroned head, and to bind the four narratives into a single loop around the devotional image at the centre.

The central group is conceived in strict frontality. The Virgin, wrapped in a dark blue maphorion over a vermilion tunic whose broad, flattened folds fall almost to the footrest, sits on a monumental throne with a tall, rounded back rendered in pale tones with dark vertical striations, a large green cushion, and a base decorated with geometric patterns and small blue lozenges. Her face follows a codified Byzantine type — elongated oval, long straight nose, large almond eyes fixed on the viewer — and her hands frame the Child without embracing him, presenting him rather than holding him. The Child sits upright on her lap, dressed in a reddish-brown garment, his right arm extended outward. Two small flying angels, painted in light tones against the dark ground, hover in the upper corners of the central field on either side of the throne back. The scale difference between the enthroned pair and every other figure on the panel is emphatic: the Virgin is at once the subject of the lateral stories and, in the centre, the throne of Wisdom removed from narrative time.

The two scenes on the left establish the Virgin’s origin and election. In the Birth of the Virgin, Saint Anne reclines on a draped bed before a cluster of pink and blue towers and domed structures, attended by women, while in the lower part of the compartment a figure busies herself beside a vessel — the familiar motif of the preparation of the newborn’s bath. Below, the Annunciation is staged across the whole width of the compartment: Gabriel, winged and dressed in pink, strides in from the left with his arm raised in address, while the Virgin, in her dark blue mantle, stands at the right before a tall, tower-like architecture that serves as her dwelling. The architecture in both scenes is not descriptive but emblematic, a set of stacked, brightly coloured volumes that signals interior and household in the conventional shorthand of Byzantinising painting, and the empty space between angel and Virgin in the Annunciation is left deliberately open, as the interval across which the divine message passes.

On the right, the Nativity is set in a rocky landscape of ochre and orange forms. The Virgin lies on a white mattress in the cave, the swaddled Child and the animals appear above her, the bathing of the Child by the midwives occupies the lower left, and Joseph sits hooded and withdrawn at the lower right, his head resting on his hand in the pose of meditative doubt codified in Byzantine art. The visual rhyme with the Birth of the Virgin diagonally opposite — in both scenes a mother reclines on a bed while attendants prepare a bath — sets Anne and Mary in deliberate parallel, one birth answering the other across the panel. Above, the Assumption shows the Virgin standing upright in the upper part of the compartment, flanked by flying angels, while groups of apostles gather below at either side. Scholarship has emphasised that this treatment departs from the Byzantine Koimesis, in which the Virgin lies dead on her bier while Christ receives her soul, and adopts instead a Western formula of bodily assumption attested in Italy around the middle of the century. The literature describes the Virgin as enclosed in a mandorla; in the panel’s present state the enclosing form is difficult to read in photographs. The choice is significant nonetheless: painters whose style remained deeply rooted in the Byzantinising tradition of Spoleto were evidently alert to new developments in Western Marian iconography.

Stylistically, the dossal belongs to the Spoletan idiom described in the literature as a deeply felt Byzantinism, transmitted locally from the twelfth-century tradition of which Alberto Sotio’s cross of 1187 is the outstanding surviving monument. Drapery is articulated through linear folds rather than modelled volume; faces are schematic and grave; the palette is dominated by the saturated contrast of vermilion and dark blue, set against greens, pinks and whites in the narrative fields. The ground now reads as a dark, brownish surface, and the paint layer shows extensive abrasion, flaking and loss, particularly in the lateral scenes and along the throne. Whether the present tonality of the background reflects its original colour or the loss of a gilded or otherwise finished surface cannot be determined from reproductions, and no published technical study of the panel has been identified. Any discussion of its materials must therefore remain provisional.

The modern history of Simeone and Machilone effectively begins with this panel. In 1937 Millard Meiss published it in The Burlington Magazine under the title “A Dugento Altarpiece at Antwerp,” analysed its style and iconography in detail, and assigned it to the Sienese milieu, with a date around 1250–60. He did not, however, notice the inscription. It runs along the lower median zone of the panel, on the suppedaneum, the footrest of the Virgin’s throne; as the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani records, Meiss studied the work without recognising the presence of this inscription and attributed it to Siena on stylistic and iconographic grounds alone.

In 1949 Edward B. Garrison published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts an article entitled “Simeone and Machilone Spoletenses,” in which he read the footrest inscription as the joint signature of the two Spoletan painters and reattributed the panel accordingly. That reattribution remains the decisive act in the modern scholarship on these artists. Before it, the two men were names attached to a lost panel formerly in Ancona Cathedral and to a crucifix published in 1926 from a Roman private collection; after it, they possessed a signed, dated and substantially preserved altarpiece around which a corpus could be assembled.

The episode also bears on the methodological claims of art history. Meiss’s judgement was not careless: the bracket he proposed, 1250–60, contains the date the inscription gives, so that his eye placed the panel correctly in time and incorrectly in space. What it illustrates is less the fallibility of connoisseurship than the specific risk of assigning works from a poorly known regional school to a better known one — Sienese painting of the mid-Duecento was a familiar quantity in 1937, Spoletan painting almost unknown. Garrison, himself a formidable connoisseur whose Italian Romanesque Panel Painting: An Illustrated Index appeared in the same year, succeeded through an act of reading rather than of stylistic inference, and the lesson is that close physical examination of the object must precede and condition the stylistic argument.

Even so, the date of the panel is not entirely settled in the literature. The inscription is generally read as giving 1258, and Meiss’s bracket of c. 1250–60 has been retained by several later studies, including the standard survey of Umbrian painting of 1989, as compatible with that reading. A later dating of c. 1270–75 circulates in some online reference compilations, but no evidentiary basis for it has been identified in the specialist literature, and it most probably results from an error of transmission. A further caveat concerns the inscription itself. The form commonly cited

SYMEON ET MACHILON SPOL,

with abbreviation marks, and the date 1258 — is a summary rendering rather than a verified diplomatic transcription of a text that survives only in fragmentary condition. For scholarly quotation it should be collated against Garrison’s original publication of 1949, rather than taken from the abbreviated version that circulates in secondary sources.

The Suffering Christ and the Kneeling Donor: The Barberini Crucifix of Simeone and Machilone

The painted cross in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini (inv. 2465) is the second of the works signed jointly by Simeone and Machilone, and the one that allows the closest study of how the two Spoletan painters handled the dominant devotional format of their age. The painted cross of the Italian Duecento was a highly codified object. A shaped panel carried the crucified Christ at its centre. The terminals (tabelloni) at the ends of the arms held the mourning Virgin and Saint John or, in richer examples, narrative scenes of the Passion.

The cimasa at the summit held the Ascension, the Salvator or the Pantocrator, and the lower extension ended in the suppedaneum. Painters working within such a tight set of expectations showed their individuality in how they modulated the type, not in inventing a new one, and it is this conventionality that makes the Barberini cross so useful as evidence. Its dimensions, 104 × 74 cm, are also significant. This is a small cross by Duecento standards, far from the monumental crucifixes suspended over rood screens or mounted on nave beams. Its scale points to a more restricted setting, such as a side altar, a chapel or a private oratory, and this accords well with the prominence given to an individual donor at its foot.

At the centre is the Christus patiens, the type that had displaced the open-eyed, triumphant Christ in central Italian painting during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Christ’s head, framed by a large gilded halo, falls onto his right shoulder, and his eyes are closed in death. His body describes the pronounced arc that became the defining feature of the type: the hips swing outward to the viewer’s left, and the thin legs return diagonally towards the crossed feet. The arms remain almost horizontal, with the hands open and pierced.

The anatomy follows Byzantine conventions. The ribcage is marked by curved striations, the abdomen is divided into schematic segments, and the modelling of the pale, yellowish flesh is achieved through linear articulation more than through gradations of light. Scholarship has consistently connected this figure with the crosses of Giunta Pisano, the painter most closely associated with the diffusion of the Christus patiens in central Italy. The model has been identified variously as Giunta’s cross for Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi and as his cross for San Domenico in Bologna. A reading published in 1998 observed that the Spoletan painters soften the physiognomic harshness and anatomical schematism of the Pisan prototype, and the Barberini Christ does convey a restrained temperance rather than the ascetic intensity of Giunta’s figures.

Behind the body, the upright and the arms of the cross are painted a deep blue, while the broad field flanking Christ’s torso and legs is gilded and bordered by a continuous band of pale, repeated ornament. This framing band sets the figure off against the gold and recalls the textile hangings that the painted field of such crosses evoked. The loincloth is rendered as a light, pinkish-white fabric traced with fine red lines, knotted at the hip and falling in a short, angular cascade. Its delicacy contrasts with the heavier, more opaque drapery of the terminal figures. The combination of gold, deep blue and warm flesh tones is typical of Umbrian painted crosses of the period. The catalogue tradition records raised, gilded mouldings along the inner frame and incised haloes as characteristic of the Spoletan group. No published technical study of this cross has been identified, however, and its materials and technique can only be described from visual examination and the older catalogue literature.

The terminals of the arms hold the two mourning figures who, in the Gospel of John, stand at the foot of the cross. On the left, the Virgin, wrapped in a dark mantle, raises her hand to her face in the traditional gesture of grief. On the right, Saint John the Evangelist, in lighter pink and blue garments, turns in three-quarter view towards the crucified Christ. It has been observed in the literature that Spoletan crosses tend to show the mourners in three-quarter view and to favour an ascensional subject in the cimasa. If this observation holds, the Barberini cross displays local traits rather than merely generic ones, and these features become useful for attributing unsigned crosses to the same milieu. The terminal figures are small in relation to Christ, and their placement at the far ends of the arms, isolated in their own compartments, turns them into witnesses rather than participants: their grief directs the viewer’s attention back to the central body.

At the summit, a small medallion encloses a half-length figure against a blue ground, and below it a red band carries a white inscription that presumably corresponds to the titulus. The Zeri Foundation catalogue and the older literature identify the subject of the cimasa as Christ blessing within a mandorla carried by two flying angels. In the panel’s present state, however, the angels are barely legible in reproduction, and the upper right section of the cimasa has suffered visible loss. The ascensional theme completes the theological sequence of the cross. The dead Christ of the upright finds his counterpart above in the living, glorified Christ, so that death and triumph are read together along a single vertical axis.

Below the crossed feet, the lower extension continues the blue field, with two small red motifs, down to the most unusual feature of the cross. A small kneeling figure in a dark garment, with hands raised in prayer, is the donor, identified in the inscription as domina Maria. Beneath her, a pale plaque carries several lines of text. The inclusion of a named, portrayed patron at the foot of the cross is not unprecedented. The lost cross painted by Giunta Pisano in 1236 for the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi is thought to have shown its patron, Brother Elias, in exactly this position, and the older literature proposed it as the probable model for the Barberini donor.

The motif nonetheless remains relatively uncommon, and it is the one point at which this cross admits a particular historical person into an otherwise wholly typological image. The title domina indicates a woman of some social standing, but nothing further is known about her identity, and whether the cross was made for her private devotion or given by her to a church cannot be established from the surviving evidence.

The provenance is documented only in part. The cross belonged to the Roman collection of R. Bastianelli; nothing is known of its earlier history. It entered the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in 1962. It was first published in 1926 in the Bollettino d’Arte, in an article entitled “Un Crocifisso romanico firmato da Simeone e Machilos,” which recorded the signature and brought the work into the literature. The date is disputed. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani states it unambiguously as 1257, describing the work as a crucifix of unknown provenance, formerly in the Bastianelli collection and since 1962 in Palazzo Barberini. Other sources, including the entry on Spoleto in the Treccani Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, give 1258. Since the Antwerp dossal is dated 1258, confusion between the two dates probably accounts for at least part of the discrepancy, but its direction cannot be established without examining the object. This entry follows the date given in the dedicated biographical entry, 1257, while noting the alternative.

As with the Antwerp panel, the full text of the inscription has not been verified in the accessible literature. Only its opening,

SYMEON ET MACHILO…,

is securely attested, together with the information that domina Maria is named in it. The complete text should be collated against the systematic catalogue of the Barberini paintings published in 2008 or against the original publication of 1926. The Zeri Foundation photographic catalogue, which records the work under entry 2061, cites the 1929 study of the Italian painted cross, the survey of Umbrian painting of 1989 and the 2008 Barberini catalogue.

The panel itself shows the marks of its history: its edges are irregular, the cimasa and the base are damaged, and the paint surface is abraded in several areas. If the 1257 date is correct, the Barberini cross and the Antwerp dossal were produced in consecutive years, and together they offer a cross-section of the workshop at its maturity. One is a crucifix of moderate size centred on an individual donor, the other a horizontal altar dossal with a narrative Marian programme. Between them they show a fully equipped atelier handling the two principal categories of painted furnishing demanded by thirteenth-century churches.

Machilonus and His Son: The Enthroned Madonna from Bugnara (1262)

The last dated work associated with the two Spoletan painters is also the most puzzling, and it forces a reconsideration of what kind of workshop they ran. It is not a panel but a carved and polychromed wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, with traces of gilding. It comes from Bugnara, in the province of L’Aquila, from the church of the Madonna della Neve, known locally as the Madonna delle Concanelle, and is now in the Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo (MuNDA) at L’Aquila. Its inscription, dated 1262, names Machilone together with his son and makes no mention of Simeone. The statue therefore closes the documented sequence that began with the lost Ancona panel of 1230 and continued with the Barberini crucifix and the Antwerp dossal of the late 1250s. It also moves that sequence across the Apennines into the Abruzzo and from painting into sculpture, raising questions that the painted works alone would never have posed.

The Virgin sits in strict frontality on a throne, her body conceived as a tall, almost columnar block. Her head is covered by a close-fitting veil that leaves the pale oval of the face exposed. The features are severe and regular: large, wide-open eyes, a long straight nose, a small closed mouth. The mantle falls from the shoulders over the arms and spreads across the knees in a broad, flat expanse, its hem edged with a narrow blue border and revealing the red of the lining and of the underdress. Below, the two rounded shoes rest on the footstool. The drapery is organised in a few large planes with shallow, linear folds rather than deep undercutting, so that the figure keeps the compactness of the original tree trunk. This restraint is characteristic of enthroned wooden Madonnas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in central Italy, a type particularly well represented in the Abruzzo, where images of this kind served as cult objects for rural churches and confraternities.

The Child does not sit at the centre of his mother’s lap, as in the strictly axial type of the Sedes Sapientiae. He is placed high on her left knee, supported from below by her left hand beneath his bare feet. He wears a long garment and faces the viewer, raising his right hand in blessing near his mother’s face and extending his left arm outward. Whether that hand originally held an attribute, such as a book or a scroll, cannot be established from the present state of the statue. The Virgin’s right hand, open and extended forward at chest level, turns the composition from a purely frontal display into a gesture of presentation. The arrangement combines the hieratic stillness of the enthroned Virgin with the lateral placement of the Child and the indicating hand familiar from painted Madonnas of Byzantine derivation. This is precisely the repertoire of the Spoletan painters, and one of the reasons the statue sits comfortably within their orbit.

The throne is a simple box-like structure, crowned by a large red cylindrical cushion with a patterned surface. Its sides are painted with a yellow ground punctuated by rows of dark vertical motifs and small lozenges, bordered in blue, in imitation of a precious textile or inlaid surface. At the base, the footstool carries the inscription on its front face, in dark capitals on a light ground, above a lower zone with shaped openings. The polychromy is much worn. The mantle has lost most of its original colour and now reads as a brownish surface, relieved by the surviving blue borders and the red of the lining; the gilding survives only in traces. The flesh areas appear comparatively well preserved, but in the absence of a published technical study it cannot be determined how much of the present surface is original and how much results from later interventions. Any judgement on the colour scheme, and therefore on the painters’ share in the work, must remain provisional.

The inscription, as recorded by the museum and by the Direzione Regionale Musei Abruzzo, reads:

(A)NNO D(O)M(IN)I MCCLXII M(A)CH(I)LON(US) ET CE(P)LA(.) EI FILIUS (DE)P(IN)S(E)RU(N)T HOC OPUS

“In the year of the Lord 1262, Machilonus and CE…, his son, painted this work.” Among the inscriptions associated with the two painters, this is the only one whose complete text has been published with its abbreviations expanded. This circumstance is worth stressing, since the two more famous painted works, the Antwerp dossal and the Barberini crucifix, remain epigraphically under-documented, known in the accessible literature only through their opening words. At least three problems arise from the Bugnara text.

The first is identification. Is the Machilonus of Bugnara the Machilon of Antwerp and Rome? The argument for identity rests on three points: the rarity of the name, the chronological proximity of four or five years to the signed paintings, and geographical plausibility, since Bugnara lies within the broad zone of Spoletan ecclesiastical and artistic influence across the Apennines. Specialist scholarship accepts the identification, and this entry accepts it as well. It should nonetheless be understood as a strong inference rather than a proven fact, because no document links the two beyond the name.

The second problem is the verb. The inscription says

DEPINSERUNT,

“they painted,” but the object is a carved statue. The literature has resolved this tension in two ways.

One reading, associated with recent work on painting and sculpture between the duchy of Spoleto and the Abruzzo, takes the inscription as evidence that the workshops of the woodcarver and the painter coincided in this milieu: the same atelier both carved and polychromed. On this reading, depingere either covered the whole operation of finishing a statue loosely, or the painters signed the part they regarded as theirs, the polychromy, while claiming the object as a whole.

A second, more restrictive reading, advanced in a study of 2011, takes the verb at face value: a painter applied polychromy over a carving executed by someone else, so that the inscription records the makers of the painted surface rather than of the statue.

he distinction is not merely technical. If the first reading is correct, Machilone’s workshop produced both painted panels and polychromed sculpture, and the boundary between the two crafts in thirteenth-century Umbria and Abruzzo was more permeable than the modern categories of “painter” and “sculptor” suggest. If the second is correct, Machilone remained a painter throughout and simply took on the polychromy of another craftsman’s carving, a common arrangement that would require no revision of his professional identity. Both readings are defensible on the evidence, and the question should be regarded as open.

The third problem concerns the son. The inscription names him as Machilone’s collaborator, but his name survives only as CE(P)LA(.), and its expansion to Ceccarello is a hypothesis rather than a reading. What the inscription does establish is the structure of the late workshop. By 1262 Machilone was working with a member of his own family, as in countless medieval ateliers, and Simeone is absent from the record.

Whether Simeone had died by then, had retired, or was simply not involved in this commission cannot be determined. It is tempting to build a narrative in which an older partner dies, a son takes his place, and the workshop continues as a family enterprise. That narrative remains a construction, and should be acknowledged as such. What the Bugnara Madonna offers with certainty is the last dated trace of Machilone’s activity, the only documented family relationship in the entire corpus, and the clearest evidence of how far the reach of a Spoletan workshop could extend by the seventh decade of the thirteenth century.

The attributed corpus: works without signatures

Around the four inscribed works, scholarship has assembled a body of unsigned paintings attributed to the two masters, to their workshop, or to their following. This corpus is unstable, contested, and in continual revision, and it should be approached with the understanding that attributions in Duecento central Italian painting are, as a class, less secure than attributions in later periods: the works are numerous, the personalities are thinly documented, and the shared conventions of the maniera greca systematically suppress the individual traits on which attribution depends.

The Orvieto Madonna Attributed to Simeone and Machilone: Gold, Glass and a Spoletan Throne

Unlike the three works examined so far, this Madonna and Child Enthroned in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo at Orvieto carries no signature. Its connection with Simeone and Machilone rests on attribution, not on epigraphic evidence. The panel belonged to the Confraternita del Carmine and was catalogued in 1888. It had probably been moved from the church of Santa Maria del Carmine around 1559, and nothing is known of its original setting or of the circumstances of its commission. A study published in 1996, devoted to Spoletan influence in southern Umbria, assigned it to the two painters and placed it around the middle of the thirteenth century. The attribution has found acceptance, but it belongs to a different order of certainty from the signed works, and the panel is best understood as evidence of the workshop’s manner rather than as a fixed point in its chronology.

The panel is vertical and round-headed. A red arched band follows the curve of the top and frames a gold ground that fills the whole field behind the figures. Two roundels of deep blue glass are set into the gold at either side of the Virgin’s head, at the level of her halo. The catalogue tradition records these inset glass “gems” as a distinctive feature of the Orvieto panel. They are a costly refinement, and their brilliance against the gold would have given the image the appearance of a jewelled object, closer to goldsmith’s work than to ordinary painting. The panel has suffered considerably. The frame area above the arch is abraded to the bare wood, the edges are damaged, and the gold ground is covered by a dense network of craquelure. The composition also appears truncated at the bottom: the lower hem of the Virgin’s dress runs off the edge of the panel, and her feet and footstool are missing. The original height of the panel was probably greater than it is today.

The Virgin sits frontally, her head and shoulders enveloped in a blue maphorion edged at the forehead with a row of pearl-like dots and sprinkled with small gold stars. The mantle falls over her arms and knees and opens to reveal a vermilion dress that descends in broad, heavy folds to the lower edge of the panel. Her face follows the Byzantine type familiar from the signed works: an elongated oval, large dark eyes, a long straight nose, a small closed mouth and an expression of grave composure. A gold halo, now faint beneath the craquelure, surrounds her head. Her hands support the Child at his side and from below without drawing him towards her, so that she functions as his throne and his presenter rather than as a tender mother. The saturated contrast of blue and red, set off by the gold ground, is the same chromatic scheme that dominates the Antwerp dossal.

The Child sits on his mother’s lap, slightly to the viewer’s left of centre, facing outward. He raises his right hand in blessing and holds a closed book at his left side. He wears a tunic and a draped mantle in warm red-orange, heavily striated with gold. The literature describes him as an adult in a toga, holding the Gospel. In the panel, his face retains a certain childlike roundness, but his dress, his gesture and his composed, frontal posture present him as the teacher and lawgiver rather than as an infant. This iconographic formula preserves the ancient conception of the Christ Child as the eternal Word, wise beyond his years. By the middle of the thirteenth century it was giving way in many centres to more naturalistic infant types, and its persistence here is consistent with the conservative, Byzantinising orientation of the Spoletan milieu.

The throne is one of the most revealing elements of the panel. Its rounded backrest is formed by pale vertical members crossed by thin red bands. It is flanked by slender posts with red and white ornament ending in small finials, and it carries rounded bolsters at the armrests. The lower sides are decorated with dense geometric patterns in red and white, in imitation of inlaid stone or precious marquetry. The pale, striated, rounded backrest closely recalls the throne of the Antwerp dossal, signed by Simeone and Machilone and dated 1258. It is one of the most tangible points of comparison between this unsigned panel and the signed corpus. Similarities of throne design do not by themselves prove common authorship, since furniture types circulated among workshops. Taken together with the facial types, the colour scheme and the drapery conventions, however, they place the Orvieto panel firmly within the same visual language.

In technique the panel displays a richness that the more damaged signed works now convey only imperfectly. The gold ground is extensive, and the Child’s garments are worked with dense gold striations in the Byzantine manner, so that the light catches his figure more than any other part of the image. The blue glass inserts add a further layer of material splendour. The dotted border of the Virgin’s veil and the small stars on her mantle, both executed in gold, demonstrate a meticulous attention to surface ornament. The decorative repertoire of the throne, with its imitation of inlaid materials, confirms the interest in precious effects. No published technical study of the panel has been identified, however, and questions of pigments, gilding technique, panel construction and later restoration remain open.

The attribution to Simeone and Machilone rests on stylistic comparison with the signed works, and its strength lies in the convergence of several features rather than in any single decisive element. A Madonna enthroned in the church of San Giusto at San Maroto, near Pievebovigliana in the Marches, has been related to the Orvieto panel and characterised as a faithful but provincial version of it. Once freed from silver crowns and heavy repainting, the Virgin’s face has been described as hard and mechanically drawn. If the relationship holds, the panel documents the transmission of a composition associated with Simeone and Machilone across the Apennines, through copying by local painters rather than direct workshop activity.

If that characterisation is correct, the Orvieto panel served as a model that local painters across the Apennines copied and adapted. This makes it a document of the diffusion of Spoletan formulae as well as a work of the workshop itself. Orvieto was, moreover, a city open to several artistic currents in the thirteenth century. The Madonna painted by the Florentine Coppo di Marcovaldo for the Servites of Orvieto shows that the local market also received works from Tuscany. The Spoletan panel therefore represents one strand among several in the city’s Duecento painting.

The dating of the panel requires particular caution. The study that proposed the attribution placed it around the middle of the century, a date that would situate it close to the signed crucifix and dossal of 1257–58 and consistent with the stylistic parallels described above. A later dating to the 1270s would place the panel after 1262, the last documented date in Machilone’s activity, at a time when Simeone no longer appears in the record.

That dating would be difficult to reconcile with an attribution to the two painters jointly, and would point instead to a follower or to the later phase of the workshop. Until a technical study or new documentary evidence becomes available, the Orvieto Madonna is best described as a work attributed to Simeone and Machilone, datable on stylistic grounds to around the middle of the thirteenth century. It is among the most richly preserved expressions of their manner, and a model that carried the Spoletan type of the enthroned Virgin beyond the walls of the city.

A Spoletan Model in Orvieto: The Painted Cross from San Lodovico by an Orvietan Follower of Simeone and Machilone

This painted cross in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo at Orvieto comes from the monastery of San Lodovico in the city and probably originated with the Poor Clares of San Lorenzo delle Vigne. Few objects illustrate more clearly how unstable attributions in thirteenth-century central Italian painting can be. Over the course of the twentieth century it was assigned, in turn, to Coppo di Marcovaldo or his son Salerno, to Margaritone d’Arezzo, to Simeone and Machilone themselves, and finally to an unnamed painter of their school. Four attributions to four distinct artistic personalities, rooted in Florence, Arezzo and Spoleto, have thus been proposed for a single work. The prevailing view now places it in the Spoletan orbit as the work of a follower active in Orvieto rather than of the two masters, and dates it broadly to the third quarter of the thirteenth century. The cross therefore holds a particular interest: it documents not the workshop itself but the reception and local reworking of its models.

The cross is a shaped panel of standard Duecento form, with square projecting terminals at the ends of the arms, a cimasa at the top, a broadened field (the apron) flanking the body of Christ, and a lower extension ending in a further terminal. The whole surface is gilded, and against the gold stands a deep blue cross that follows the upright and the arms behind Christ’s body, edged with narrow pink bands. The apron is bordered on both sides and at the bottom by a checkered band of small red, black and white squares, a motif that evokes inlaid stone or a woven border and sets off the figure against the gold. Above Christ’s head, a dark plaque carries the titulus in white capitals

IHS NAZARENUS / REX IUDEORUM.

The gold ground is covered by a dense network of craquelure and has flaked in many places, and there is a large area of loss over Christ’s right forearm, where the bare preparation is visible.

Christ is represented as the Christus patiens, the suffering and dead Christ that had become standard in central Italy by the middle of the century. His head, framed by a large gold halo with incised rays, falls onto his right shoulder. The eyes are closed, the brows drawn together, and long locks of brown hair fall over the shoulder. The arms extend almost horizontally with the hands open and pierced. The body inflects in a gentle arc rather than the pronounced curve of the Giuntesque models. The anatomy is rendered with a marked emphasis on the abdomen, which swells into a rounded, almost bulging form above the loincloth. The ribcage and pectoral muscles are indicated by curved striations, and the torso is divided into schematic segments according to Byzantine conventions. The pale, yellowish flesh is modelled with restraint, and the whole figure conveys a heavy, inert stillness more than the dramatic tension of the finest Pisan crosses.

The loincloth is one of the most distinctive elements of the cross. It is long and ample, painted in a silvery white traced with fine black and brown stripes, knotted at the waist and falling in layered folds almost to the knee on the viewer’s left. The transparent effect and the striped pattern recall the light fabrics of the Spoletan signed crucifix, but the treatment here is more voluminous and descriptive. Below, the legs descend nearly straight, and the feet are crossed one over the other, pierced by a single nail and resting on a dark rectangular suppedaneum, with red drops of blood marking the wounds. The single-nail formula, with the feet crossed, reinforces the sense of the body’s weight settling downward.

In the terminals of the arms stand the two mourners. On the left, the Virgin, wrapped in a blue maphorion, raises one hand to her face in the traditional gesture of grief while the other rests at her chest. On the right, Saint John, in pale garments, inclines his head and brings his hand to his cheek in a matching gesture of sorrow; his figure is more abraded. Both figures are shown in three-quarter view, turned towards the central body, a disposition that the literature identifies as characteristic of Spoletan crosses. Their scale is small, their gestures contained, and their isolation within the square terminals makes them witnesses whose grief directs attention back to the dead Christ at the centre.

The cimasa is exceptionally well preserved in comparison with the signed Barberini cross. Christ appears within a blue oval mandorla, dressed in light garments with a red mantle, raising his hand in blessing. Two flying angels with long, pale wings flank the mandorla and appear to bear it aloft. This ascensional subject, with the Salvator carried by angels, corresponds exactly to the formula that the literature considers typical of the Spoletan cross and that the older catalogue descriptions record in the damaged cimasa of the Barberini crucifix. The Orvieto cross thus makes legible a composition that survives only in fragmentary form in the signed work. The lower terminal is by contrast severely damaged. A gold arc, possibly part of a halo, traces of blue ground and a heavily damaged central area survive, and the subject originally represented there cannot be identified with confidence.

Comparison with the Barberini crucifix, signed by Simeone and Machilone and dated 1257, explains both the Spoletan attribution and its qualification. The two crosses share the general structure: the blue cross against a gold ground, the bordered apron, the mourners in three-quarter view in the terminals, the Salvator in a mandorla with angels at the summit, and the light, striped loincloth. The differences are equally telling. They include the checkered border in place of the pale ornamental band, the longer and more voluminous loincloth, the gentler inflection of the body, and the heavier, swollen treatment of the abdomen. These features suggest a painter who had absorbed the Spoletan model thoroughly but interpreted it with a personal inflection and a certain provincial emphasis. They also explain why earlier scholarship could look for comparisons in Florentine and Aretine painting, whose crosses share some of the same conventions.

The attribution to an Orvietan follower rather than to the masters themselves is the most prudent reading of the evidence, and the date of c. 1250–75 is consistent with it. The cross would then belong to the years in which the signed works of the Spoletan workshop were being produced, or shortly after. Its original setting among the Poor Clares gives it a specific devotional context. For a community of Franciscan nuns, meditation on the suffering Christ was central to religious life, and the cross would have served as a focus of prayer and contemplation of the Passion. Above all, the San Lodovico cross demonstrates the reach of the Spoletan formulae beyond Spoleto itself. In Orvieto, a city that also received works from Florentine painters such as Coppo di Marcovaldo, a local artist adopted the Spoletan type of the painted cross and reproduced its essential structure. This is precisely the mechanism by which the influence of Simeone and Machilone, documented in only a handful of signed works, came to shape the painting of a much wider region.

A Living Christ in Procession: The Vatican Cross from the Orbit of Simeone and Machilone

The painted cross in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (inv. MV.40005.0.0) is the work that part of the literature has cited, without further discussion, as a cross by Simeone and Machilone in the Vatican collections, identified only by the old number “n. 5.” The correspondence between that number and the present inventory makes the identification highly probable. The museum catalogues the work cautiously as “Orvietan school (Simeone and Machilone?),” with a date of c. 1260–70, and describes its subject as the living Christ. Both qualifications matter. The question mark acknowledges that the cross carries no signature and has received no detailed modern study. The iconographic type, as will be seen, sets the work apart from the one cross signed by the two painters. It is best approached as a work of the wider Spoletan-Orvietan orbit, whose relationship to the documented workshop remains to be established rather than assumed.

The object is a processional cross, painted in tempera and gold on a poplar panel and measuring 104 × 74 cm. Poplar was the standard support for panel painting in central Italy. The dimensions and function distinguish the work from the large crosses suspended above rood screens or mounted on nave beams. Crosses of this kind were carried in procession on a staff, and were designed to be legible in motion and from a distance, often in the open air. They were frequently painted on both faces, so that the image could be seen from either side as the procession moved. Whether the reverse of the Vatican cross is painted should be verified. The outline is compact and clearly articulated. The arms end in square terminals with projecting corners, the upright ends above in a short rectangular cimasa and below in a stepped lower extension. The whole surface is gilded, and against the gold stands a dark cross, almost black with greenish tones, behind the body of Christ.

The central figure is described by the museum as the living Christ, and this places the cross in a particular position within the development of the type. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Christus patiens, dead on the cross with closed eyes, had become the dominant image in central Italy, largely through the influence of Giunta Pisano. The Vatican cross instead retains the older conception of Christ alive upon the cross, while giving his body many of the features of the newer type. The head, framed by a gold halo with traces of the cruciform nimbus, inclines towards his right shoulder. The body is markedly emaciated, with a narrow chest traced by dense, curved striations, and it swings to the viewer’s left in a perceptible arc before the long, thin legs descend to the crossed feet. The arms extend almost horizontally, thin and elongated, with the hands open. The result is a hybrid image. It keeps the living Christ of the earlier tradition, yet borrows from the Christus patiens the curved and suffering body, so that victory and pain are presented at once.

The loincloth is short and knotted at the waist, painted in a cool greenish-blue with darker folds. It contrasts with the warm tones of the flesh and with the light, striped fabrics of the Barberini and San Lodovico crosses. The feet are crossed one over the other and pierced by a single nail. The painter gives particular emphasis to the blood. Red streams run from the wounds in the hands, and on the dark lower extension below the feet two further streams flow downward in flame-like forms. The insistence on the wounds suits the processional function of the object. It made the cross an image of sacrifice presented to the faithful as it passed among them, in keeping with the intense devotion to the wounds of Christ that marked religious life in thirteenth-century Umbria. That the Christ who bleeds is also the Christ who lives gives the image a double meaning: the Passion is shown together with its overcoming.

The most significant compositional choice concerns the mourners. The Virgin and Saint John do not appear in the terminals of the arms, as in the Barberini and San Lodovico crosses. They stand at full length on the gold ground of the apron, on either side of Christ’s body, each resting on a narrow strip of green ground that suggests the hill of Calvary. The Virgin, at the left, wears a dark blue mantle over a red dress and raises her hand in a gesture of grief. Saint John, at the right, in a brownish robe, bows his head and brings his hands together. This arrangement belongs to an older tradition of the painted cross, and one with a specifically Spoletan precedent. On the cross signed by Alberto Sotio in the cathedral of Spoleto, dated 1187, Christ is shown alive with his eyes open, apparently impervious to his pain, as was usual before the thirteenth century, and full-length figures of the grieving Virgin and Saint John stand at his sides. The Vatican cross combines precisely these two features, the living Christ and the full-length mourners in the apron. It thus preserves, some eighty years later, the structure of the most important surviving cross of the local tradition.

The terminals of the arms, freed from the mourning figures, carry small roundels at their projecting corners. Their silvery surfaces are much abraded, and their original content, possibly heads or busts, can no longer be read with confidence. The rectangular cimasa holds a red field that probably carried the titulus, now largely illegible. There is no trace of the ascensional Salvator in a mandorla that the literature regards as characteristic of Spoletan crosses and that appears in the Barberini and San Lodovico examples. Its absence is consistent with the image of the living Christ, since the triumph that the ascensional scene expresses in the cimasa is here already embodied in the central figure. The paint surface shows widespread craquelure, abrasion of the gold and losses along the edges, a condition consistent with an object handled and carried over a long period. The contrast between the dark cross and the gold ground may have been accentuated by the darkening of the original colours.

Comparison with the signed Barberini crucifix of 1257 explains both the attribution and its uncertainty. The two works share the dark cross set against gold, the emaciated and curving body, and the general Byzantinising idiom of Umbrian painting in the mid-thirteenth century. They differ fundamentally in iconography and programme. The Barberini cross shows the dead Christus patiens on a Giuntesque model, with the mourners in the terminals and the Salvator in the cimasa. The Vatican cross shows the living Christ, with the mourners on the apron, roundels in the terminals and no ascensional scene. Some of these differences may reflect the processional function, which called for a compact and immediately legible design, or the wishes of a patron attached to an older type of image. Others may point to a different painter. The Vatican cross also differs from the San Lodovico cross at Orvieto, which follows the Barberini arrangement closely. The museum’s “Orvietan school” label therefore places it in a local context in which Spoletan models were received in more than one form, both current and archaic.

The date proposed by the museum, c. 1260–70, falls after the signed works of 1257–58 and around the time of Machilone’s last documented activity, the Bugnara Madonna of 1262, in which Simeone no longer appears. A joint execution by the two painters in this decade would lack documentary support, and the question mark in the museum’s attribution reflects this. The deliberately archaic iconography further complicates the attribution. A painter whose signed cross adopts the most up-to-date Pisan model would, a few years later, have had to return to the formula of the previous century, and the evidence does not allow this possibility to be confirmed or excluded. The most prudent reading places the Vatican cross among the works of the Spoletan-Orvietan circle. Its interest lies in the persistence it documents. In the 1260s, while the Christus patiens dominated central Italian painting, a painter in this milieu could still turn to the living Christ and the standing mourners of the Spoletan tradition, and carry that older image through the streets in procession.

The Maestà of Otricoli: A Spoletan Madonna between Simeone and Machilone and Coppo di Marcovaldo

The panel of the Madonna and Child enthroned in the church of Santa Maria Assunta at Otricoli, kept in the Cappella della Madonna della Misericordia, is one of the works most closely associated with the Spoletan painters in southern Umbria, and at the same time one of the most debated. Otricoli lies on the southern edge of the region, near the Tiber and the border with Lazio. This is precisely the territory in which, according to the standard biographical entry on Machilone, the art of the two Spoletans became a point of reference for a series of paintings originally located in the Umbrian-Lazio area. A study published in 1996, devoted to the Otricoli panel as evidence of Spoletan cultural influence in southern Umbria, placed it in relation to Simeone and Machilone. More recent scholarship has instead considered it the work of an anonymous Spoletan master close to Coppo di Marcovaldo. The caption’s formula, “Umbrian painter (Simeone and Machilone?),” reflects this uncertainty accurately.

Few works of the period have had so turbulent a modern history. The panel was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War, restored in 1965 by the Soprintendenza, stolen in 1978, and recovered in 1989. Its present condition bears the marks of these events and of centuries of devotional use. The upper part of the panel is reduced to bare wood, and the edges are broken and irregular. The original gold ground has almost entirely disappeared, leaving only a dark arched zone around the heads. The haloes of the Virgin and Child now read as dark, greyish areas in which the gilding has been lost or altered. A dense network of craquelure covers the flesh areas, particularly the Virgin’s face. The painted surface of the figures and the throne is nonetheless relatively legible, and allows a close reading of the composition.

The Virgin sits on the throne with her body turned slightly, her knees directed towards the viewer’s left and her head inclined gently towards the Child. She wears a dark blue, almost black maphorion over a red dress that falls in broad, deep folds to the bottom of the panel. Beneath the maphorion, a white veil covers her head and falls over her left shoulder, marked by small groups of dark parallel dashes arranged in a regular pattern. The veil lends a distinctive, luminous accent to the upper part of the figure. The face follows a Byzantine type: an elongated oval, a long straight nose, a small mouth and large almond eyes turned sideways towards the viewer. The sidelong gaze gives the Virgin an expression of reserved melancholy, directed neither fully at the Child nor fully at the faithful.

The Child sits on his mother’s right arm, on the viewer’s left, supported by her hand beneath him. He wears a red tunic and a greenish mantle wrapped around his body and legs. His posture departs clearly from the frontal, hieratic Child of the Orvieto panel attributed to Simeone and Machilone. He turns towards his mother and lifts his face to look up at her, his hand reaching towards her chest, where a white object, probably a scroll, can be discerned. The upward gaze establishes a direct relationship between mother and son, absent from the strictly frontal images of the Spoletan tradition. The Child also has a more childlike appearance, with a rounded face and a lively expression, closer to an infant than to the adult-like teacher of the Orvieto panel.

The composition combines two Marian formulae. The Virgin is enthroned, as in the Maestà images of the thirteenth century. Yet she holds the Child on one arm and points to him with her raised left hand, the defining gesture of the Byzantine Hodegetria, the Virgin who shows the way. Here the gesture acquires a new inflection. The pointing hand is directed towards a Child who is himself turned towards her, so that the indication of Christ to the viewer merges with an exchange of gazes between mother and son. The image thus preserves the doctrinal function of the Hodegetria, presenting Christ to the faithful, while introducing a note of intimacy. This tendency spread through central Italian painting in the second half of the thirteenth century.

The throne is richly described. Its backrest, rounded at the top, is painted with vertical cream and yellow bands crossed by fine green lines and curving horizontal strokes. The pale, striated backrest recalls the thrones of the Antwerp dossal, signed by Simeone and Machilone in 1258, and of the Orvieto panel attributed to them, and constitutes one of the clearest links between the Otricoli Madonna and the Spoletan corpus. The backrest is framed by red uprights decorated with a black meander pattern. A large green cushion lies across the seat. The lower sides of the throne are red and decorated with oval motifs surrounded by radiating dots, like stylised jewels or rosettes, separated by bands of small dots. At the bottom of the panel, beneath the hem of the red dress, the Virgin’s foot appears in a red shoe studded with pearls. This detail derives from Byzantine imperial costume and presents the Virgin as Queen of Heaven.

The attribution rests on a balance between these two components. On one side stand the Spoletan elements: the striated throne backrest, the Byzantinising face of the Virgin, the red and dark blue colour scheme and the decorative repertoire of the throne, which place the panel in the visual language of Simeone and Machilone. On the other side, the more recent reading points to Coppo di Marcovaldo. It cites as comparisons his Madonna del Bordone in Siena, dated 1261, and the Madonna he painted for the Servites of Orvieto. The relational Child who turns to look up at his mother, the broad and weighty handling of the drapery, and the greater sense of volume in the figure suggest familiarity with the Florentine painter’s work. Coppo’s presence in Orvieto offers a plausible channel for this contact. The two readings are not strictly incompatible. A Spoletan-trained painter could have absorbed the lessons of Coppo while keeping the conventions of his own tradition.

The date given in the caption, c. 1250–70, reflects this double orientation. If the Coppesque elements are accepted, a date after 1261, the year of the Madonna del Bordone, becomes likely. This would place the Otricoli panel at the very end of Machilone’s documented activity, or beyond it, and would make a joint execution by the two Spoletans difficult to sustain. The most prudent description is therefore that of a work by a painter of the Spoletan school active in southern Umbria in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, whose relationship to Simeone and Machilone remains an open question. Its importance does not depend on the attribution. The Otricoli Madonna shows how the Spoletan tradition, at the southern limit of its reach, met the most innovative Tuscan painting of its time, and how that encounter introduced a new warmth into the severe image of the enthroned Virgin. The survival of this fragile panel, despite war, theft and loss, keeps that encounter visible.

The Madonna and the Passion: Rinaldo di Ranuccio’s Triptych in Pittsburgh and the Legacy of Simeone and Machilone

The portable triptych in the Frick Art Museum at Pittsburgh has been placed in the literature within the circle of Simeone and Machilone. The museum attributes it to Rinaldo di Ranuccio of Spoleto, and this is fully consistent with that earlier placement. Rinaldo is one of the few Spoletan painters of the next generation who can be identified by name. The standard biographical entry on Machilone lists him among the masters of Spoletan culture active in the third quarter of the thirteenth century whose work shows echoes of the art of Simeone and Machilone, and it is on the strength of such echoes that the two are described as true heads of a school. The Pittsburgh triptych therefore does not belong to the corpus of the two painters in the strict sense. It shows how their pictorial language was carried forward by a painter trained in their milieu.

The work is a portable triptych painted in tempera and silver on panel, measuring 127 × 104.8 cm when open. It consists of a tall central panel with a round-arched top, flanked by two narrower arched wings that close over it. When open, the wings display four scenes of the Passion of Christ. The museum’s title also records Saints Anthony and Francis, who do not appear on the interior and must therefore occupy the exterior faces of the wings, visible when the triptych was closed. The use of silver instead of gold for the metallic ground was a more economical solution, widely adopted in the thirteenth century. Silver was usually covered with a yellowish varnish to imitate gold, and its tendency to oxidise may explain the brownish, olive-toned appearance that the ground now has in several areas. The portable format points to devotional use by a religious community or an individual rather than to the fixed setting of a high altar.

The central panel is dominated by the Virgin enthroned, wrapped in a dark blue, almost black maphorion over a red dress that falls in broad folds to the base of the throne. Her head inclines slightly towards the Child, whom she holds on her left arm. Her right hand is raised before her chest and turned towards him in the indicating gesture of the Byzantine Hodegetria. The Child, in a green tunic and a pink mantle, sits against his mother and turns towards her, reaching out to her with one hand. The exchange between mother and son, with the Child turned towards the Virgin rather than facing the viewer, belongs to the more relational type that was spreading in central Italian painting in these decades, and that also appears in the Otricoli Madonna. Two small angels fly in the upper corners of the panel, above the red arch that frames the figures.

The throne is covered by a cushion and decorated at the sides with patterned bands. It rests on a base marked by a red band and a row of stylised foliate ornament. The Virgin’s facial type, with its elongated oval, long straight nose and almond eyes, and the saturated contrast of dark blue and red, continue the conventions of the Spoletan Madonnas associated with Simeone and Machilone. The composition, however, moves away from the strict frontality of the Orvieto panel attributed to them. The Virgin’s body turns slightly, the Child’s pose is more animated, and the drapery acquires a greater sense of volume in the folds over the knees. The change is one of emphasis rather than of language. Rinaldo remains within the Spoletan idiom, but opens it to a more tender and more naturalistic conception of the mother-child relationship.

The left wing carries the first two scenes of the Passion. Above is the Betrayal: Christ stands at the centre of a dense crowd of soldiers and Jews, whose spears and torches rise behind them, as Judas embraces him with the treacherous kiss. Below is the Flagellation. Christ, stripped to the waist, is bound to a tall column that divides the scene vertically, while two tormentors on either side raise their whips against him. The composition of both scenes is simple and legible. The crowd of the Betrayal is compressed into a compact mass of heads and haloes, and the Flagellation is reduced to its three essential figures, arranged symmetrically around the column.

The right wing carries the last two scenes. Above is the Deposition. Christ’s body is lowered from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea, while Nicodemus, at the foot of the cross, removes the nails from the feet, and the Virgin and the holy women at the left receive the body with gestures of grief. Below, in a rocky landscape in which the dark opening of the tomb can be discerned, is the Lamentation. Christ lies on a shroud above a red cloth scattered with small ornaments, as the Virgin bends over his face in a final embrace. Small winged figures, probably mourning angels, much abraded, appear in the upper corners of both scenes. Read together, the four scenes trace the Passion from the arrest to the burial. The juxtaposition with the central panel is deliberate. The Child held tenderly on his mother’s arm is the same body that she will take into her arms in the Lamentation, and the triptych invites the viewer to contemplate the Incarnation and the Passion as a single mystery.

The presence of Saints Francis and Anthony on the exterior of the wings places the work firmly in the Franciscan devotional context of the later Duecento. The literature identifies the second saint as Anthony of Padua, canonised in 1232, whose image provides a terminus post quem for the triptych. The pairing of the two most venerated saints of the order suggests that the work was made for a Franciscan community or for a patron closely connected with it. The programme of the interior is consistent with this context. Franciscan spirituality placed particular emphasis on compassionate meditation on the sufferings of Christ and on the grief of the Virgin, and a portable triptych joining the Madonna and Child to the Passion was an ideal instrument for that devotion: opened for prayer, and closed again under the image of the order’s founders.

The attribution to Rinaldo di Ranuccio rests on comparison with his signed works. Two painted crosses bear his name: one in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Fabriano, signed

[RA]NALDICTUS RA[N]UCI DE SPOL[ETO],

and one in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Bologna, signed

MAGISTER RAINALDO RANUCII

and dated 1265.

A historiated triptych of about 1270 in the crypt of Santa Chiara, with the Madonna and Child enthroned and scenes from the life of Christ on the inner faces of the doors, is also attributed to him, and provides the closest typological parallel to the Pittsburgh work. The museum dates the Frick triptych to 1265, and the date given here, c. 1265–70, falls in the decade following the signed works of Simeone and Machilone and overlaps with the last documented activity of Machilone. The triptych thus documents the moment of transition between the two generations of the Spoletan school. The formal language of the elder masters, their facial types, colour scheme and Marian iconography, persists. It is now placed at the service of a more intimate conception of devotion, and of the narrative and Franciscan interests that would shape Umbrian painting in the decades that followed.

Taken together, the attributed corpus describes a workshop and a following rather than two individual hands. This is, in the end, the most useful way to think about it: the signed works give us the centre, and the attributed works give us the field of influence around it, with the density of the attribution thinning steadily as one moves outward from Spoleto toward Orvieto, Otricoli, Camerino, and — in the case of works long ago dispersed to the art market — Antwerp and Pittsburgh.

Style, technique, and the problem of two hands

An obvious question has been deferred until now: can the hands of Simeone and Machilone be distinguished from one another?

The honest answer is that no convincing separation has been proposed in the accessible literature. The two men signed jointly, at least three times over a period of nearly three decades, and no study has succeeded in assigning particular figures, compartments, or passages to one rather than the other. This is not a failure of scholarship so much as a consequence of the material: two jointly signed works survive, both of them by both painters, with no autograph work by Simeone alone against which a comparison could be run. The single work by one painter alone — the Bugnara Madonna — is by Machilone with his son, is a polychromed sculpture rather than a painting, and is thus doubly unsuited to serve as a control.

What can be described is the collective manner. It combines, as noted, a Spoletan Byzantinising base with Giuntesque elements derived from Pisa. Its physiognomic types are severe and schematic; its drapery is articulated linearly; its compositions favour frontality and hierarchical scale in the iconic images and a compressed, emblematic legibility in the narrative compartments. The handling has been described, in relation to the Giuntesque models, as softening the harshness of the Pisan prototype — a description that accords with the general impression of these works as competent, dignified, and somewhat tempered rather than expressively extreme.

On technique, the record is thinner than one would wish, and this must be stated as a genuine gap rather than filled by plausible inference. No dedicated technical or scientific study of these two painters — pigment analysis, dendrochronology, examination of ground layers, systematic comparison of punchwork — has been identified in the course of this research. What survives in the catalogue tradition is a handful of observations about surface treatment: raised and gilded mouldings at the inner frame of the crosses; haloes incised or engraved with foliate scrolls, described in the Italian sources as graffite a girali; and, in the Orvieto dossal, a gold ground with inset gems of blue glass.

These are not trivial details. Incised foliate haloes and raised gilded mouldings belong to a specific technical repertoire that can, in principle, be traced across workshops, and inset glass gems in a gold ground are a distinctive and relatively costly refinement. A systematic study of punchwork and incision across the Spoletan group would very probably do more to clarify the boundaries of this workshop than any further stylistic argument. That such a study does not appear to exist is, from the point of view of the present state of the question, the single most consequential lacuna.

A related observation concerns the range of the workshop’s production. If the inclusive reading of the Bugnara inscription is accepted, the atelier handled panel painting and polychromed wood sculpture alike. This would be unremarkable in the context of thirteenth-century Umbrian practice, where the distinction between the two crafts was in any case less sharp than modern categories imply — a painter’s guild-level competence in the preparation of grounds, gilding, and pigment application was directly transferable from a panel to a carved figure. But the evidence for it in this particular case rests on a single inscription and a contested reading of a single verb.

The school of Spoleto and its diffusion

The claim most often made for Simeone and Machilone in the broader histories of Italian painting is that they were capiscuola — heads of a school — whose formal language shaped the next generation of Umbrian painting. The claim was put forward with particular force in a 1973 survey of Umbrian and Marchigian painting, and it has been widely accepted, though it is a claim of a different order from the attributional propositions considered above and should be assessed on its own terms.

The painters said to have been shaped by their example include Rinaldo di Ranuccio — also called Rainaldetto — who is himself a documented Spoletan personality of the later Duecento; the Master of Saint Francis, the outstanding anonymous Umbrian painter of the third quarter of the century, author of the dossal from San Francesco al Prato in Perugia and of frescoes in the Lower Church at Assisi; and the painters responsible for the scenes of the Renunciation of Worldly Goods and the Dream of Innocent III in the Lower Church.

Assessing this claim is not straightforward, because the direction of influence in a regional school is rarely demonstrable in the way that an attribution is. What can be said is that the chronology permits it: the signed works of the Spoletan pair fall in the 1230s and 1250s, and the careers of the Master of Saint Francis and of Rinaldo di Ranuccio fall in the 1260s and 1270s. What can also be said is that the proposition is a stylistic judgement made by specialists with an intimate knowledge of the regional material, and that it has not, to the knowledge of this essay, been seriously contested. It should be reported as the prevailing scholarly view rather than as an established fact.

More concretely documented is the geographical diffusion of the workshop’s compositional solutions. The evidence assembled in recent scholarship — including studies of cross-Apennine artistic exchange published in the Spoletan local journal Spoletium and in the 2015 monograph on the Spoletan school — indicates that formulae originating in this milieu travelled into the Marches, appearing at Fabriano, Matelica, Camerino, Visso, and Ascoli; into Lazio; and into the Abruzzo, where the Bugnara Madonna stands as the signed terminus of the movement. The Pievebovigliana Madonna, described as a faithful but provincial version of the Orvieto composition, is the clearest single instance of the mechanism.

Two further extensions of the workshop’s radius have been proposed. A 1987 study on Margarito and Restoro d’Arezzo connected the Spoletan painters to the Aretine dossal tradition, suggesting a line of contact westward into Tuscany. And a 2004 exhibition catalogue on Roman painting between Giotto and Cavallini linked them to a panel of Roman culture in the Museo Civico at Viterbo, suggesting a southward connection toward Rome and the Lazio. Both propositions are single-study hypotheses rather than settled conclusions, but they are consistent with one another and with the general picture of a workshop whose products and formulae circulated over a radius of two hundred kilometres and more.

The phrase used in the recent literature for this phenomenon — the longue durée vitality of the Spoletan school across the Apennines — captures something important. The influence of Simeone and Machilone was not a matter of a brilliant innovation rapidly superseded, but of a durable regional idiom that continued to supply models to painters in a wide zone for generations. That is a different kind of art-historical significance from the one usually celebrated, and arguably a more representative one for the period.

The historiography: how two painters were recovered

The modern recovery of Simeone and Machilone proceeded in identifiable stages, and the sequence is instructive both for what it reveals about the artists and for what it reveals about the discipline.

• The antiquarian substrate (seventeenth to early twentieth century)

The earliest trace is Pichi Tancredi’s Anconologia, recording the lost cathedral panel. For two centuries thereafter the names survive only in local antiquarian knowledge. They begin to surface in the printed literature in the early twentieth century, through the channels typical of that stage of Italian art-historical work: a historical and artistic guide to the cathedral of San Ciriaco published at Jesi in 1912, a volume on Spoleto published at Bergamo in 1921, and the first volume of Raimond van Marle’s Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, published at The Hague in 1923. At this stage the painters are little more than names attached to a lost work.

• The discovery of a surviving signed work (1926)

The publication in the Bollettino d’Arte of “Un Crocifisso romanico firmato da Simeone e Machilos” transformed the situation by producing a physical object bearing the signature. From 1926 onward, the two painters have an extant autograph work.

• Typological placement (1929)

The great study of the Italian painted cross published at Verona in 1929 — a work later praised as definitive — situated the Barberini crucifix within the developmental history of the type, established its relation to the crosses of Giunta Pisano, and thereby gave the Spoletan pair a place in the internal history of a genre rather than merely a place on a list of names. Its discussion at pages 737 to 740 remains the foundational treatment of the object.

• The Antwerp episode (1937 and 1949)

Meiss’s study and Garrison’s correction, discussed above. With Garrison’s article and his Illustrated Index of the same year, the corpus acquires both its masterwork and its first systematic catalogue framework.

• Corpus-building and contextualisation (1962–1989)

A series of studies through the second half of the twentieth century placed the pair within successively wider frames: a 1962 article on Duecento painting in Umbria; a general history of early Italian painting of the same year; the 1969 catalogue of the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria; the 1972 catalogue of the Orvieto Museo dell’Opera del Duomo; the 1973 survey of Umbrian and Marchigian painting that advanced the capiscuola thesis; the 1984 study of the formation of the Orvieto museum; the 1987 article on the Aretine connection; the 1987 French monograph on Duecento painting in central Italy; the 1989 Paragone article on the Master of the Madonna di San Brizio; and, above all, the two-volume survey of Umbrian painting published in 1989, which remains the standard regional reference.

• Synthesis and re-examination (1996–2015)

A 1996 study of the Otricoli Maestà reconsidered the Spoletan cultural influence in southern Umbria and proposed attributions within the corpus. The 1998 and 2008 Barberini catalogues re-examined the crucifix. The 2004 exhibition on Roman painting between Giotto and Cavallini set the pair in relation to Roman culture. And in 2006 the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry established the standard biographical account, from which most subsequent summaries derive. Most recently, the 2015 monograph on the school of Spoleto and associated studies of the Spoleto–L’Aquila axis have reconsidered the Bugnara group and the relation between painting and polychromed sculpture.

Two observations arise from this sequence. The first is how much of the modern understanding depends on a small number of physical discoveries — the 1926 publication of the crucifix, the 1949 reading of the Antwerp footrest, the recognition of the Bugnara inscription — rather than on interpretative advances. The second is that the trajectory has been consistently toward enlargement of the frame: from two names on a lost panel, to a signed crucifix, to a school, to a regional phenomenon of cross-Apennine diffusion. Whether that enlargement is fully warranted by the evidence is a question the field has not systematically posed.

Conclusion: the value of a small corpus

It would be possible to conclude an essay on Simeone and Machilone by regretting how little is known — by treating them as a case of documentary poverty, a pair of names that happen to have survived where hundreds of their contemporaries did not. That would be a legitimate conclusion, and it has the merit of accuracy. But it would miss what is genuinely instructive about them.

What makes these two painters worth extended attention is precisely the tightness of the evidentiary situation. Because the corpus is small and the documents are few, every claim about them is traceable to its source, and the operations by which art history constructs an artistic personality are unusually visible. One can watch a career being assembled: an antiquarian records an inscription in the seventeenth century; the manuscript is lost; the work is lost; the notice survives in the printed tradition and generates a starting date. One can watch an attribution being made and unmade: a great scholar looks at a panel in 1937 and sees Siena; another scholar looks at the footrest in 1949 and reads Spoleto. One can watch a school being built outward from four inscriptions, its boundaries drawn and redrawn as each generation of specialists reconsiders the unsigned works.

The painters themselves emerge from this process with a definite if modest profile. They were competent professionals working in the standard formats of their time and place — the monumental painted cross, the horizontal altar dossal, the enthroned Madonna — for a clientele of cathedral chapters, religious communities, confraternities, and private donors, distributed across an ecclesiastical territory that reached from the Adriatic coast to the Abruzzo mountains. Their style was rooted in the Byzantinising tradition of their own city, inherited from the twelfth century, and modified by attention to the most influential contemporary model in their principal genre, the Pisan crosses of Giunta. They were not stylistic innovators, but neither were they mechanical copyists: the Assumption in the Antwerp dossal shows a painter alert to a new Western iconography at the moment of its diffusion. They sustained a partnership over at least twenty-eight years and probably longer, and when it ended, one of them continued with his son.

Finally, they were sufficiently consequential within their own region that a school could be named after their city and a formal language traced from their workshop to the anonymous masters who painted at Assisi in the following generation. That is, in the end, the ordinary shape of significance in the art of the Italian Duecento: not the isolated genius but the durable regional idiom, transmitted by workshops whose names, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have not survived at all.

Simeone and Machilone signed their work. Four times, across thirty-two years, they wrote their names on objects intended to outlast them, and three of those objects are still here. Against the odds of the thirteenth century, that is not a small achievement, and the modest corpus it has left us repays the care required to read it honestly.