Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano

A Painter Who Was a Sculptor: The Critical Identity of the Master

The first duty of any essay on the so-called Maestro dei Magi is to correct the category in which he is often placed. Enquiries framed around “late-medieval painting in Fabriano” tend to cast him as one more panel painter in the constellation that runs from the Maestro di Campodonico to Allegretto Nuzi and Francescuccio di Cecco Ghissi, and on towards the young Gentile da Fabriano. The literature does not support this. Every serious catalogue entry, museum record and scholarly essay on the figure treats him as a sculptor in wood, the author of carved, gessoed, painted and gilded statues on a monumental, life-size scale. His conventional name, in its fuller and more precise form “Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano”, was coined for the author of the sculptural group of the Adoration of the Magi from the church of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Fabriano. That group survives today in the Pinacoteca Civica Bruno Molajoli without its central Madonna and Child. The name is therefore not derived from a painted Adoration. Readers who come to him expecting a tempera panel will find instead a cast of standing and kneeling figures that once formed, with a lost or dispersed Virgin, a three-dimensional tableau of the Epiphany.

The chronological frame also needs adjusting. The master belongs to the second half of the Trecento, not to the threshold of the Quattrocento. The catalogue of the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia dates the two Magi in its collection to the 1360s. The foundational studies of the corpus place both of the principal Adoration groups in the 1360s and 1370s, a dating that later critics have generally accepted. The Fabriano museum describes the figures as works of the second half of the fourteenth century and situates the master “in stretta contiguità” with the painting of Allegretto Nuzi and Francescuccio Ghissi. He is thus a contemporary of Nuzi’s maturity, working in the decade and a half before the painter’s death in 1373, and not a precursor of Gentile’s International Gothic. The overlap with Gentile’s generation is at most a matter of the workshop’s afterlife.

What gives the figure his particular interest for the study of Fabriano is that he offers something the painted record alone cannot: evidence that Fabriano in the age of Nuzi sustained a sculptural culture of the first rank, alert to Tuscan models, able to produce replicas and variants of large-scale groups, and tied closely enough to the local painters that the boundary between carving and painting becomes, at certain points, hard to draw. One general account of medieval art in the Marche, the entry in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, describes the second half of the Trecento in Fabriano as the moment when “una scuola di intagliatori” flourished whose figural decorativeness touched that of Allegretto Nuzi. It cites the group of St Joseph and the Magi, together with the Sant’Anatolia in Camerino, as the example of such connections “di grande nobiltà e grazia di forme”. The same entry turns immediately afterwards to the wooden Calvary of the Beati Becchetti in Sant’Agostino. That juxtaposition is a useful reminder that the sculptural culture of the city in the later Trecento was plural, and that the Maestro dei Magi was one workshop among several.

Modern study of the master rests on three contributions. Romualdo Sassi, the Fabriano archivist and historian, published in 1955 the short article in the Rivista storica benedettina, “Un monaco olivetano scultore”. There he brought to light documents concerning Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo and proposed that this monk was the author of the Misericordia group. Enrica Neri Lusanna, in a series of studies beginning in 1992, reconstructed the master’s personality on stylistic grounds, gave him the name by which he is now known, distinguished between two Adoration groups, and framed his relation to Tuscan sculpture and to Nuzi. Giampiero Donnini, in a 1993 essay on “Giovanni di Bartolomeo e gli scultori fabrianesi” and again in a 2014 catalogue essay titled with the phrase “de lignamine laborato et depicto”, revived and extended Sassi’s identification. All other contributions, by the curators of the 2021–2022 Allegretto Nuzi exhibition, by the authors of the Palazzo Venezia wood sculpture catalogue and by specialists in Italian Gothic sculpture outside Italy, are referred to here without naming their authors.

Fabriano after the Black Death: Carvers, Painters and the Theatre of Devotion

The painted landscape of Trecento Fabriano is familiar: the Giottesque inheritance transmitted through Assisi, the idiosyncratic plastic power of the Maestro di Campodonico, the Franciscan and Augustinian¹ commissions, and the return of Allegretto Nuzi from Tuscany. What needs emphasis here is the place of wood sculpture in that landscape. Nuzi, born at Fabriano between about 1315 and 1320 and dead in 1373, is documented in Florence in 1346 and returned to Fabriano around the time of the plague of 1348. His subsequent work, drawing on Sienese and Florentine models, turned towards a decorative, linear, textile-rich idiom that became the dominant visual language of the city for a generation. His pupil Francescuccio di Cecco Ghissi, whose Madonna of Humility in the Pinacoteca is dated 1359 by inscription, carried that idiom into a more insistently ornamental register suited, as one exhibition account put it, to the demands of provincial patrons.

Life-size polychrome sculpture played a role in this devotional culture that painting could not fully assume. Figures carved in the round and set before a wall or in a niche could stage sacred narrative in real space. This was the “teatralizzazione della devozione” that one recent introduction to Umbro-Marchigian wood sculpture identified as the defining achievement of the genre, and that the Fabriano exhibition of 2014 described as the staging of “presepi scenografici”. Some later commentators have seen in these groups a precocious anticipation of the Sacri Monti of northern Italy. That comparison is suggestive, but it belongs to interpretation rather than to documented intention. Nothing in the surviving evidence tells us how the Misericordia group was displayed in the fourteenth century, whether it was permanent or seasonal, or what liturgical or paraliturgical use it served.

It is worth stating plainly how the Maestro dei Magi relates to the other anonymous masters of Fabriano, because the nomenclature invites confusion. A 1994 exhibition in Fabriano, I legni devoti, published an essay by Neri Lusanna that treated together “il Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano e il Maestro della Madonna di Campodonico”. The latter is a sculptor named after a wooden Madonna from Campodonico. He is not the painter known as the Maestro di Campodonico, author of the frescoes from San Biagio in Caprile, treated in his own entry. The shared toponym is a coincidence of provenance, not evidence of a single hand working across media, and nothing in the literature I have consulted proposes that the painter and the Madonna sculptor were the same person. The link between the Maestro dei Magi and the Calvary of the Beati Becchetti is likewise one of context rather than attribution. The encyclopedia account cited above speaks of the Calvary as the most singular work “di questa o altre botteghe fabrianesi”, and the formula is deliberately noncommittal. The Calvary was made after the Augustinian beati returned from their pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1393, and its Pietà, with broken lines betraying a northern matrix, suggests a different sensibility. There is no secure basis for attributing it to the workshop of the Maestro dei Magi.

The Olivetans at Santa Caterina in Castelvecchio

If the identification with Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo is to be weighed properly, the institution to which he belonged must be understood. The Olivetans² were a Benedictine³ reform congregation founded in 1313, when the Sienese patrician Giovanni di Mino Tolomei withdrew to a penitential life with Ambrogio di Mino Piccolomini and Patrizio di Francesco Patrizi on his property at Accona, in the Ombrone valley south of Siena. Guido Tarlati⁴, bishop and lord of Arezzo, who held jurisdiction over the site, approved the foundation under the Rule of St Benedict in 1319. Papal confirmation came from Clement VI⁵ on 21 January 1344, by which time, as the older Treccani account puts it, the new institute was already “fiorente di monaci e monasteri”. The congregation spread rapidly through central Italy in the middle decades of the century. An art-historical tradition has long associated it with the practice of the arts within the cloister: the congregation’s own historians in the early twentieth century published studies of Olivetan illuminators, calligraphers, embroiderers and intarsia workers, culminating in the famous Fra Giovanni da Verona.

In Fabriano the Olivetan house was the monastery of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, built on the height of Castelvecchio. This was the older of the two feudal castra from whose union the medieval city grew; the other, Castelnuovo or the Poggio, was later the site of the Benedictine nuns of Santa Margherita. The monastery’s later history is better documented than its origins. The friars who now serve the church record that they entered the convent and church of Santa Caterina, “che prima era appartenuta ai monaci Olivetani”, only in 1823, after the Napoleonic suppressions. The complex was taken by the state in 1866 and in part converted to a poorhouse. Local historical compilations report that members of the Chiavelli family, lords of Fabriano in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were buried in the church. They also describe Chiavello Chiavelli as a protector of the Olivetans. I have not been able to verify either claim against a primary document, and both should be treated as local tradition until confirmed.

One strand of evidence connects the Olivetan community to the wider artistic world of the city. According to genealogical research published by Sassi in 1928 and repeated in local historical literature, Gentile da Fabriano’s grandfather Giovanni was a prominent member of the smiths’ guild and served as sindaco of the convent of Santa Caterina di Castelvecchio. Gentile’s father Niccolò is said to have abandoned business after his wife’s death to take the Olivetan habit. If these data are correct, and I have encountered them only at second hand, they show that the Olivetan house was woven into the fabric of the city’s mercantile and artisanal families. They also show that a monk-artist working within it in the 1360s–1380s would have moved in the same social circles from which Gentile himself later emerged. That is context, however, not proof. It makes the presence of an Olivetan carver in Fabriano entirely credible, but it tells us nothing about which works he carved.

Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo: What the Documents Say, and What They Do Not

The documentary basis of the identification is fundamental, and it is here that the evidence is thinnest. What can be established with confidence is the following. In 1955 Romualdo Sassi published a four-page article in the Rivista storica benedettina, volume 24, pages 1–4, titled “Un monaco olivetano scultore”. In it he brought to notice an Olivetan monk named Giovanni di Bartolomeo, a sculptor documented in Fabriano between 1365 and 1385, and proposed him as the author of the Adoration group from the Misericordia. The date range is reported in exactly these terms in the English-language literature on the master: the sculptor is described as “documented in Fabriano between 1365 and 1385”. The Pinacoteca Molajoli, which adopts the identification, gives a slightly different formulation. It states that Fra’ Giovanni “aveva una bottega nel convento di Santa Caterina, attiva dal 1365 alla fine del secolo”. The discrepancy between an end date of 1385 and “the end of the century” cannot be resolved without access to the documents themselves. It may reflect either further archival finds made after 1955 or a looser extrapolation from the workshop’s presumed continuity. I have not been able to consult Sassi’s article or the documents it publishes, and I therefore cannot report their exact wording, the nature of the transactions they record, or whether any of them names a patron, a price or a subject.

The second stage of the identification is owed to Giampiero Donnini. His 1993 contribution to the volume Scultura nelle Marche bears the title “Giovanni di Bartolomeo e gli scultori fabrianesi” (pages 243–256). The title alone shows that by the early 1990s the Olivetan monk had become, in Donnini’s framing, the organizing name for a Fabriano school of wood sculpture. Twenty-one years later, in the catalogue of the exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile. Pittura e scultura a Fabriano fra Due e Trecento (Fabriano, Pinacoteca Civica, 26 July–30 November 2014, extended to 18 January 2015, by which point the exhibition had drawn, according to ArtsLife, “oltre 75.000 presenze”), Donnini published an essay titled “Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo. Maestro ‘de lignamine laborato et depicto’” (pages 87–91).

The Latin phrase, “of worked and painted wood”, is a formula with a wider currency in the scholarship on medieval Marchigian wood sculpture: it also serves as the title of a book-length study of the subject published in 2001. Whether it appears verbatim in a document concerning Giovanni di Bartolomeo, or is a scholarly coinage drawn from comparable contracts, I have not been able to verify. Artribune’s coverage of the 2014 exhibition (August 2014) reported that the sculptor, “identificato come Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo”, was the person “al quale venne commissionato un presepe dipinto”. If this refers to a document, it would be the single most important datum in favour of the identification, since a documented commission for a presepe by a Fabriano carver active in the 1360s–1380s would be strikingly apposite to an Adoration group. I cannot confirm its date, its patron, or its source, and it must be treated as a reported claim awaiting verification against Donnini’s published text.

A third body of archival work should be mentioned. In 1997 a contribution titled “Documenti per la storia della plastica lignea a Fabriano nel XIV e XV secolo” appeared in the volume Scultura e arredo in legno fra Marche e Umbria. It gathered notarial evidence for the practice of wood sculpture in the city. Its relevance to Fra’ Giovanni specifically I have not been able to assess.

On this evidence the epistemic situation can be stated precisely. It is documented, on the strength of Sassi’s publication as reported by later scholars, that an Olivetan monk named Giovanni di Bartolomeo worked as a sculptor in Fabriano over roughly two decades from 1365. It is also documented that the Misericordia group and its related works are stylistically datable to the same decades. It is not documented that Fra’ Giovanni made the Misericordia group, or any other surviving statue. The identification therefore rests on a coincidence of place, date and medium.

That coincidence is not negligible in a small city, but the city was one in which, as the encyclopedia account indicates, more than one workshop of carvers was active. The most forceful statement of the objection comes from the English-language catalogue entry of 2004 on the Florentine Madonna. It holds that there is “no basis whatsoever” for the identification, “since no works exist by this master that could serve as a comparison”. The formulation is severe, but it states the methodological point correctly. In the absence of a single work securely documented as Fra’ Giovanni’s, there is nothing against which the anonymous corpus can be tested. The Palazzo Venezia entry, published in February 2025, is more measured but reaches a comparable conclusion: “Non ha avuto particolare seguito la proposta di identificare il Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano con fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo, maestro di ‘lignamine’ attivo a Fabriano nella seconda metà del Trecento.”

The Pinacoteca’s position, that the Maestro dei Magi “ad oggi è identificabile” with Fra’ Giovanni, is a legitimate museological choice. It gives visitors a name, and it follows the local line of scholarship from Sassi to Donnini. It should not be mistaken for a critical consensus. Neri Lusanna’s reconstruction, the sculpture catalogue of Palazzo Venezia and the curatorial essays accompanying the 2021–2022 Nuzi exhibition all retain the anonymous name. The most defensible formulation for the present is that the identification is plausible and archivally grounded as to the existence and activity of the monk, but unproven as to the attribution of any work. It should be cited as “attributed by some scholars” rather than as a fact.

The Eponymous Group: The Adoration from Santa Maria della Misericordia

The group that gives the master his name consists today of four figures in the Pinacoteca Civica Bruno Molajoli: a standing St Joseph and the three Magi. The provenance is recorded by the museum as the former church of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Fabriano. Around 2004 the figures were described as being in the Archbishop’s Palace in Fabriano, and the encyclopedia account of 1997 located them between the Pinacoteca and the Museo degli Arazzi. The group is now reunited in the civic museum. The central Madonna and Child is missing, and its fate is one of the open problems discussed below.

The museum’s own catalogue record for one of the Magi, identified as Balthazar, gives a height of 173.2 cm and describes the figure as life-size polychrome wood. The other two kings follow the traditional differentiation of the Magi by age, which the museum glosses as a late-medieval allegory of the three ages of man. One is shown kneeling, as the oldest king conventionally does before the Child, and one is young and beardless. St Joseph completes the group.

What strikes the viewer before the figures, and what the museum rightly singles out, is the handling of drapery. The sculptor “conduce il gioco delle pieghe dei tessuti”, in the Pinacoteca’s words, with folds articulated by turned-back edges and openings, and these are then “esaltate” by the colour applied over them. Here the specific technique of the group matters. The figures of the Fabriano Adoration carry a thick gesso preparation, overlaid by a thinner gesso layer used to articulate the ornamentation. In other words, the painted decoration of the garments, the floral and foliate motifs and the gilding, was built up partly in relief in the gesso before being painted and gilded. The result is a surface on which the textile patterns of contemporary Fabriano painting, the brocades and damasks of Nuzi’s saints, are translated into low relief and colour on a body carved in the round.

The condition of the group has not, to my knowledge, been the subject of a published technical report that I could consult, and I cannot say what restorations it has undergone or how much of the visible polychromy is original. The existence of the double gesso layer and its contrast with the thinner preparation of the related works in Rome and in the Florentine collection has, however, been noted in the specialist literature. It is one of the principal technical arguments for distinguishing the two groups.

The Uncrowned King: the Eldest Magus of the Fabriano Adoration

Of the three kings of the Misericordia Adoration, it is the eldest who carries the theological weight of the scene, and the sculptor has given him a posture in which the whole doctrine of the Epiphany is condensed. The old man kneels and bends deeply forward, his back curving into a long arc, his bare head lowered towards the place where the Child once sat enthroned on his mother’s lap. Following a convention consolidated in Trecento painting, the first of the Magi has already set aside his crown, the earthly king uncrowning himself before the King of kings, and he has already surrendered his gift: his hands, now empty, fold across his breast in a gesture that hovers between prayer and the pressing of emotion to the heart. The long hair falls in heavy, spiralling locks around a face furrowed with age, the beard descending in thick waves over the chest, and the lowered profile, with its deep-set eyes and strong nose, achieves a gravity of expression that the standing kings of the group, for all their intensity, do not attempt. Seen in the round, the figure reads as a single continuous curve of homage, from the nape of the bowed neck to the drapery pooling over the bent legs, and it is this curve, more than any attribute, that identifies him: he is the act of adoration itself, given bodily form.

The surface is among the best witnesses to the group’s celebrated double gesso technique. On this Magus the relief-worked ornament survives with particular richness: the mantle is a deep vermilion sown with gilded floral sprays, while the borders at the neck, along the closure and down the hem are treated as continuous bands of foliate pattern, so that the garment reads as a princely brocade rendered in relief and colour. These painted textiles are the point at which the master’s sculpture touches most closely the panel painting of Allegretto Nuzi, whose gold-figured silks they translate into three dimensions; recent scholarship has gone so far as to propose that the polychromy of the statues is owed to Nuzi himself or to his workshop, a hypothesis that remains attractive but undocumented. The kneeling king thus stands at the exact seam between carving and painting in Trecento Fabriano, whichever hand held the brush.

Within the reconstruction of the master’s activity the figure belongs to the eponymous group, the ensemble from Santa Maria della Misericordia now reunited in the Pinacoteca, comprising St Joseph and the three Magi around a lost Madonna and Child known only from an old archive photograph. This is the version of the Adoration in which the workshop is judged to have played the larger part: its thick double preparation and somewhat more rigid handling distinguish it from the finer second group, represented by the two standing kings in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome and by the Madonna acquired for Fabriano in 2023, where a thin gesso lets the carving speak and the master’s own hand is recognized. The distinction, established by Enrica Neri Lusanna in her studies of invention and replica in the master’s production, does not diminish the Fabriano figures; it documents, rather, a workshop organized to repeat a successful sacred apparatus, an exceptional circumstance in life-size Trecento sculpture.

Nothing certain is known of how the group was displayed in the fourteenth century, whether as a permanent apparatus or a seasonal one, but the kneeling king presupposes a fixed dramaturgy: he marks the point of arrival of the Magi’s procession, the moment at which movement becomes prostration. His companions stand, point to the star, hold their gifts in readiness; he alone has completed the act. In the staged sacred theatre that these Fabriano ensembles brought into real space, he is the figure with whom the medieval beholder, approaching the image to kneel in turn, was invited to identify.

The King and the Star: Balthazar of the Fabriano Adoration

If the kneeling elder of the Misericordia Adoration embodies homage accomplished, this crowned king embodies homage in suspense. He stands at full life size, a man in the vigour of maturity, his bearded face composed into an expression of grave, searching intensity, and the sculptor has assigned him the group’s most eloquent narrative device. In the palm of his right hand, drawn in gracefully against the body, he holds the small covered vessel containing his gift, not yet surrendered; with his left hand, raised to the level of the chest, he extends the index finger upwards, pointing to the star. The gesture is of remarkable economy. It converts a frontal, essentially static cult statue into an actor within a sequence, directing the beholder’s eye from the king to the invisible light above and thence, by implication, to the Child towards whom the whole ensemble converged. Within the conventional differentiation of the three Magi by age, a late-medieval allegory of the ages of man that the group observes in full, he occupies the middle term: no longer the impetuous youth, not yet the prostrate elder, but the king who reads the heavens and understands what he sees.

The handling of the drapery is where the master’s art declares itself most openly. The heavy mantle is gathered across the body in long diagonal sweeps, its edges turned back to reveal the lining, and it falls at the sides in deep-cut folds that give the figure, seen from any angle, a continuous play of ridge and hollow. Over this carved structure runs the celebrated polychromy of the Fabriano group: a vermilion mantle strewn with gilded motifs above a tunic whose blue, enriched with minute gold leaves in the museum’s description, has darkened with time to the deep, almost black-green tone visible today, against which traces of the gilt ornament still glint. The technique is that of the whole Misericordia ensemble, so that the princely brocades are built up physically before they are coloured. These painted textiles translate into three dimensions the gold-figured silks of Allegretto Nuzi’s panels, a kinship that registers how close carving and painting stood in Trecento Fabriano.

In the reconstruction established by Enrica Neri Lusanna, this is the version of the Adoration in which the workshop played the larger part, and the comparison with the finer second group is instructive rather than damaging: set beside his Roman counterpart of the same iconography, the Fabriano Balthazar shows the same invention transmitted through the shop, the composition held, the surface more thickly armoured in ornament.

Standing at 173.2 centimetres, the king met the medieval beholder eye to eye. That parity of scale was the point of these ensembles: in the staged sacred theatre that the Fabriano workshops brought into real space, the faithful did not contemplate the Epiphany from without but entered a procession already in motion, passing the standing kings with their gifts and their pointing hands towards the kneeling elder and the enthroned Child. This Balthazar, poised between the star above and the gift in his palm, holds that procession’s central beat, the moment of recognition before the moment of surrender.

The Gift Still in Hand: the Young King of the Fabriano Adoration

The youngest of the Misericordia kings closes the allegory of the three ages of man that governs the whole ensemble, and the sculptor has characterized him with a precision that goes beyond the mere absence of a beard. The face is smooth and full, framed by locks that curl out from beneath the crown at the temples and over the ears; the eyes are wide and level, fixed on a point ahead rather than raised to the star or lowered to the Child; the whole expression carries the slightly stunned candour of the man who has travelled farthest in understanding in the shortest time. Where the mature Balthazar reads the heavens and the kneeling elder has already surrendered his gift, the young king simply holds his: he carries the covered vessel before him at the waist, cradled in both hands with the deliberate care of one entrusted with something whose weight he is still measuring. It is the least rhetorical of the three attitudes, and perhaps for that reason the most affecting. In him the procession of the Magi is at its beginning, expectation not yet resolved into recognition or homage, and his tall, columnar stance, the tallest figure of the group at nearly one metre eighty, gives the ensemble its upright opening chord.

The costume distinguishes him sharply from his companions. Beneath the mantle, which falls open from the shoulders in long lateral cascades of red figured with gilt ornament, he wears not the loose tunic of the older kings but a garment that breaks at the hip into a skirt of dense vertical pleats descending to the ankle, its border once articulated with painted and gilded pattern. This pleated undergarment, close to the courtly fashion of the mid-Trecento, marks him as the group’s man of the present, the king dressed as a young nobleman of the sculptor’s own day, and it offers the carver a virtuoso passage: the regular fluting of the pleats plays against the broad, irregular sweep of the mantle above, a deliberate counterpoint of geometry and fall. The technique is that of the whole Misericordia ensemble, so that the vestiges of pattern still legible along the borders and across the mantle are relief as much as colour. The surface has darkened and abraded with time, but where the vermilion and the gilt sprays survive they still declare the translation into three dimensions of the gold-figured silks of Allegretto Nuzi’s panels.

Like his companions, the young king belongs to the Misericordia ensemble, in which the workshop’s share was greatest: its double gesso preparation and firmer, more armoured handling distinguish it from the master’s autograph second group, represented by the two kings in Rome and the Madonna acquired for Fabriano in 2023.

Restored to the company of St Joseph and his two fellow kings in the museum, the young Magus recovers something of his original function in the staged sacred theatre of Trecento Fabriano. These life-size ensembles placed the Epiphany in the beholder’s own space, and each figure held a distinct beat of its dramaturgy: the elder kneels, the mature king points to the star, and the youth stands at the threshold, gift in hand, waiting his turn. Six and a half centuries later, that suspended expectancy is still what the figure communicates first, before any question of workshop, technique or name.

St Joseph from the Misericordia Adoration

Every figure of the Misericordia Adoration performs; St Joseph alone withdraws. He sits low on a rocky seat, wrapped from shoulder to foot in a heavy vermilion mantle over a slate-blue tunic, and props his bearded cheek on his right hand while the left rests open and idle on his knee. The pose is the immemorial one of the pensieroso, and the sculptor has committed to it entirely: the raised shoulder, the head tilted into the supporting palm, the brows drawn faintly together above eyes that look past everything in front of them. When the group was reassembled for the exhibition of 2014, a reviewer fixed the figure in two words, “pensoso e malinconico,” and the description has stuck because it names precisely what the carving achieves. This is the Joseph of a long Trecento tradition, familiar from painted Nativities and Epiphanies, in which the foster-father sits apart at the margin of the mystery, present but not participant, absorbed in a thought the beholder is left to reconstruct: perplexity, humility, foreboding, or simply the weariness of the journey. What is remarkable is to find the type carried into monumental sculpture in the round, where the marginal figure of the painted corner becomes a full bodily presence, seated in the beholder’s own space and thinking.

Within the dramaturgy of the ensemble his stillness is structural. The three kings articulate a progression, the youth holding his gift, the mature Balthazar pointing to the star, the elder kneeling with hands emptied, and every gesture among them refers forward to the lost Madonna and Child at the centre. Joseph is the counterweight: the one figure whose gesture refers inward, whose gaze escapes the scene’s own axis. The composition needs him exactly as Trecento painting needed him, as the human margin of the divine event, the place where wonder cools into thought. His reduced height, seated at just over a metre against kings of one metre seventy and more, would have set his bowed head below theirs and beside the enthroned Virgin’s, a deliberate lowering that is both spatial and theological.

The figure shares the technique of the whole Misericordia group, and here the polychromy survives with unusual coherence. The vermilion of the mantle keeps much of its body, pooling in the deep folds that cascade over the knees and break against the rocky base; the tunic’s blue-grey has darkened but reads continuously; and along the collar and cuff run the gilded borders, sown with pattern, that tie the statue to the painted textiles of Allegretto Nuzi’s panels. The flesh passages are the finest of the group: the veined, long-fingered hand spread on the knee, the modelling of the cheek pressed out of shape by the supporting palm, the grey-streaked beard cut in fine parallel strands. Whatever the division of labour between the master and the workshop that Enrica Neri Lusanna’s reconstruction assigns the larger share of this ensemble, distinguishing it from the autograph second group divided between the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia and the Madonna acquired for Fabriano in 2023, the Joseph argues that the shop at its best conceded nothing in expressive intelligence.

Reunited with the three kings in the Pinacoteca, around the absence of the stolen or dispersed Madonna known only from an archive photograph, the seated Joseph completes what survives of the sacred theatre that Santa Maria della Misericordia once staged. The kings gave the medieval beholder a procession to join; Joseph gave them something subtler, a figure already inside the mystery who still wonders at it. Six centuries on, his hand-propped melancholy remains the group’s most modern note, and its most humane.

The Roman Magi and the Madonna of the Florentine Collection

The decisive step in the reconstruction of the master came with the recognition that a second Adoration group, closely related to the Fabriano one but not identical with it, survives in fragments. Its best-documented components are two standing Magi in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome, inventory numbers 14034 and 14035. The museum’s catalogue entry, published in 2025, supplies the essential data. Both figures are life-size, carved in the round from single blocks of poplar. The wood species was confirmed by analysis at the IVALSA-CNR in Florence, and the pigments were analysed at the ICVBC-CNR, also in Florence. Figure (a), 174 cm high and 52 cm wide, is identified as Caspar. He stands on an irregular base, wrapped in a softly draped blue mantle ornamented with plant motifs, and holds the vessel of incense, which is partly lost, as is the tip of the nose. The crowned head and slightly forward-leaning torso turn to the viewer’s left. At the back the mantle falls in deep, triangular folds. Figure (b), 178 cm high and 65 cm wide, is identified as Balthazar. His face carries a thick beard dressed in two curls, and his crowned head is slightly lowered. His expression, in the catalogue’s words, is “intensa e pensosa”. His mantle is cinnabar red with traces of gilding and falls behind in vertical folds. Parts of the arms that held his gift are missing. The condition of both is recorded as good, with losses of material and of paint film.

The provenance of the Roman figures, as the catalogue reconstructs it, runs back through Italian state collections but not to Fabriano. The statues were deposited at Palazzo Venezia in 1976 from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini. They had entered that collection after the suppression of Rome’s Museo Artistico-Industriale, in whose 1906 catalogue they are listed (p. 30, no. 5). How they came to the Museo Artistico-Industriale, and from which church in the Marche or elsewhere they were removed, is not recorded in the sources I have been able to consult. The catalogue’s conclusion that the statues “dovevano far parte di un gruppo con lo stesso soggetto” is an inference from their iconography and their close correspondence to the Fabriano Magi. The two were shown together with the Fabriano figures in the 2014 exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile.

To these two Magi Neri Lusanna, in 1992 and more fully in 2002, joined a seated Madonna and Child then in a Florentine private collection. The work is 131 cm high in that catalogue (the Fabriano museum record gives 133 × 67 × 55 cm), in polychrome wood, and dated in its catalogue entry to about 1360–1380. The Virgin sits on a low bench covered with fabric and a white cushion. She wears a long vermilion robe with a narrow neckline and long sleeves under a mantle that covers her head, falls over her shoulders and is drawn across both legs towards her left side. Her pose is strictly upright and frontal, with legs and arms placed almost symmetrically. Her face has what Neri Lusanna called “the abstract smile of an idol”. The Child sits on her raised left thigh in a long white robe. With her left hand the Virgin supports him, and with the fingertips of her right she holds the base of a vessel, which the Child grasps with both hands, turning towards his mother as his right leg slips out of the robe while his head turns back towards the giver. The vessel is the key to the figure’s function: it is the gift just received from a Magus, and it places this Madonna at the centre of an Adoration. The back of the statue is relatively flat and unmodelled, with the lower section hollowed out. It was made to be seen from the front, against a wall or in a niche, like the Magi who approached it.

The argument that joins this Madonna to the Roman kings rather than to the Fabriano group is at once formal and technical, and it is among the most elegant pieces of connoisseurship in the literature on Trecento wood sculpture. Neri Lusanna had found, in the photographic archive of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, an old photograph of the lost Madonna of the Fabriano group. The two Madonnas prove to be almost identical in gesture, posture and drapery. Closer inspection, however, reveals consistent differences. The Child of the Fabriano Madonna is more rigidly axial, which diminishes the narrative interplay; the outlines of the Fabriano Virgin are less lively; and in the Fabriano version the Child’s body is hidden behind folds, whereas in the Florentine Madonna his rounded belly shows through. Above all the preparations differ. The Fabriano figures have the thick double gesso described above, while the Florentine Madonna has a very thin gesso layer that does not conceal the carving. In its paint and preparation, according to Neri Lusanna, the Florentine Madonna matches the Palazzo Venezia Magi. The Roman kings, in turn, differ from their Fabriano counterparts in the same subtle ways. The conclusion is that two Adoration groups existed, one in Fabriano and one reconstructed from the Rome and Florence fragments. The latter, with its finer preparation and somewhat higher quality, is judged the master’s own work. In the Fabriano group the workshop probably played a larger part. The St Joseph and the oldest, kneeling Magus of the Roman group are lost.

The Florentine Madonna has had an unusually public modern history. It was exhibited in New York at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in 2004–2005, and at Montalto Marche in 2006 in the exhibition Sacri legni: sculture da Fabriano e dalla Marca Picena. It was then lent to the Fabriano exhibition Allegretto Nuzi e il ‘300 a Fabriano (Pinacoteca Molajoli, 14 October 2021–30 January 2022). One review of that exhibition described it as the “gemella” of another Madonna and noted that it was displayed from its original viewpoint, turned slightly to three-quarters so as to give the Child full frontality. After the exhibition the Fabriano banking foundation Fondazione Carifac bought the work from its lender, “la Galleria d’Arte Callisto Fine Arts di Londra”, and the purchase was announced by Carifac’s president, Dennis Luigi Censi, when the statue was presented at the Pinacoteca in May 2023 as a new addition to the civic collection (Cronache Ancona, 12 May 2023). It now stands in Fabriano, close to the Misericordia group.

The Gift Received: the Carifac Madonna of the Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano

The Virgin sits erect on a low bench, her pose of an almost liturgical frontality, and it is precisely this severity that the sculptor sets in tension with the small drama unfolding on her lap. The Child, perched on her raised left thigh, has just received a gift: a covered vessel, which he clasps with both hands while twisting back towards the giver, his right leg slipping free of the long white robe so that the bare foot swings out over his mother’s knee. The Virgin steadies the vessel from below with the fingertips of her right hand, a gesture of quiet mediation between donor and recipient. The vessel is the key to the statue’s original function. This is not a devotional Madonna conceived in isolation but the hieratic centre of a life-size Adoration of the Magi, towards which carved kings once advanced; the object in the Child’s hands is their offering, caught at the instant of its acceptance. The composition thus preserves, in a single figure, the narrative logic of an entire lost ensemble.

The statue belongs to the second of the two Adoration groups reconstructed for the anonymous master named after the Epiphany ensemble from Santa Maria della Misericordia in Fabriano. Two of its kings survive in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome (inv. 14034 and 14035), carved like this figure from single blocks of poplar; the St Joseph and the kneeling eldest Magus are lost. The connection between the Madonna and the Roman kings, first argued by Enrica Neri Lusanna, rests on a comparison with an archive photograph of the lost Madonna of the Misericordia group, a near-identical composition that nevertheless betrays a duller hand: a more rigidly axial Child, less animated contours, and a thick double gesso preparation that smothers the carving beneath ornament in relief. The present figure, by contrast, carries only a thin preparation over which the paint follows the cut of the wood, and its Child turns with a suppleness the replica never matched. On this evidence the statue is judged the master’s autograph invention, the Fabriano ensemble a workshop repetition, and the pair together a rare demonstration of invention and replica in monumental Trecento sculpture.

The Virgin’s face, with its long almond eyes and faint, withdrawn smile, what Neri Lusanna memorably called the abstract smile of an idol, points to the master’s formation in the wake of Andrea and Nino Pisano, whose models circulated in Umbria and the Marche after the Orvieto years. The tenderness of gesture and the taste for painted textile, meanwhile, tie him closely to the painting of Allegretto Nuzi, whose workshop some recent scholars have credited with the polychromy of these statues, a suggestive hypothesis that remains unproven. Equally unresolved is the identification of the master with Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo, the Olivetan monk-sculptor of Santa Caterina in Castelvecchio, proposed by Romualdo Sassi in 1955 and sustained by Giampiero Donnini: the coincidence of place, decades and medium is real, but no document links the monk to any surviving work.

The condition visible today records six centuries of wear with unusual eloquence. The vermilion of the robe survives in a saturated field at the breast and in flashes at the hem, while the mantle, once a deeper green over its preparation, has thinned to a mottled, almost bronze-like patina through which the vigorous cutting of the folds, gathered in long diagonal cascades across the legs, reads with sculptural clarity. The flesh tones of both faces are better preserved, keeping the figures their startling immediacy. The back is flattened and hollowed, confirming a frontal placement against a wall or within a scenic apparatus. After appearances in New York (2004–2005), Montalto Marche (2006) and the Fabriano exhibition dedicated to Allegretto Nuzi (2021–2022), the statue’s acquisition by the Fondazione Carifac has placed the Madonna of the second Adoration, whose two kings remain in Rome, beside the Misericordia ensemble in the same museum for the first time.

The Young King of the Roman Adoration

The younger of the two surviving kings of the Roman Adoration stands on an irregular base in an attitude of arrested approach, his crowned head turned to the viewer’s left and lifted slightly, as though the star had just crossed his line of sight. The face is beardless and full-cheeked, framed by locks that swell out from beneath the foliate crown and curl at the jaw; the wide, level eyes and small mouth give him the unguarded openness that the master reserves throughout his production for the youngest of the three ages of man. Before him, cradled at the waist, both hands support the vessel of his gift — reduced today to its open cup, its cover lost — so that the figure seems to offer not an object but the gesture of offering itself.

The pose deserves attention for its quiet asymmetry. The weight settles on one leg while the torso leans gently forward and the head rotates against it, a torsion slight enough to preserve the figure’s columnar dignity yet sufficient to break the block’s frontality and set the king in motion towards the enthroned Madonna who once received him. It is precisely this suppleness, the sense of a body pausing rather than posing, that distinguishes the autograph Roman group from its Fabriano replica, where the corresponding invention hardens into a more emphatic frontality.

The costume is a study in courtly layering. Over a long pale tunic gathered at the hip by a knotted sash falls a short shoulder-cape with dagged, lozenge-cut edges, the height of mid-Trecento fashion, and over everything sweeps the great mantle, its exterior once a deep blue sown with plant motifs, its lining flashing vermilion where the folds turn back. The blue survives today in mottled passages down the figure’s left side, falling in a long diagonal cascade to the base, while abrasion has carried much of the surface back to the pale ground, lending the statue its present ivory-and-lapis tonality.

The technique is that of the master’s own hand as the scholarship has defined it. The figure is carved from a single block of poplar, the species confirmed by analysis at the IVALSA-CNR in Florence, with the pigments studied at the ICVBC-CNR; over the carving lies only a thin gesso preparation, which follows rather than smothers the cut of the wood. The contrast with the thick double gesso of the Misericordia ensemble, where ornament is built up in relief before painting, is the principal technical argument by which Enrica Neri Lusanna separated the two Adorations and assigned this one to the master himself, the Fabriano group to his workshop.

Condition is legible and honestly worn. The tip of the nose is lost, the vessel has surrendered its cover, and the paint film is abraded across the raised folds, yet the essential carving — the crisp foliate crown, the fine articulation of the supporting hands, the deep triangular folds into which the mantle gathers at the back — remains intact. Nothing visible suggests substantial recarving, and the losses, concentrated where a processional or scenic use would predict handling, belong to the statue’s long working life rather than to any single catastrophe.

Within the reconstruction of the master’s second Adoration, Caspar takes his place beside the bearded Balthazar (inv. 14035) and the seated Madonna and Child acquired for Fabriano in 2023, whose Child turns to grasp a vessel just received; the kneeling eldest king and the St Joseph of this ensemble are lost. The critical consensus, registered in the museum’s 2025 catalogue entry, refers both Roman figures to the Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano, and their finer preparation and livelier handling mark this group as the invention from which the Misericordia ensemble was replicated.

The provenance runs through Roman institutional history rather than back to any documented church. The two kings appear in the 1906 catalogue of Rome’s Museo Artistico-Industriale; on that museum’s suppression they passed to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini, and in 1976 they were deposited at Palazzo Venezia, where they remain. Where in the Marche, or elsewhere, they were first removed from is unrecorded, and the original location of the master’s autograph Adoration is among the open problems of his study.

The question of the carver’s name remains where the documents leave it. The identification with Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo, the Olivetan monk-sculptor active in Fabriano from 1365 proposed by Romualdo Sassi in 1955 and sustained by Giampiero Donnini, has found little following in recent scholarship, and the Roman catalogue records the reservation explicitly. Under his conventional name, the master’s young Caspar stands in Rome as the finest surviving statement of his art at its most gracile: a king caught between the road and the throne, his emptied vessel still lifted in offering.

The Pensive King: Balthazar of the Roman Adoration

The bearded king of the Roman Adoration is the largest of the securely attributed figures, and he carries his scale with a gravity that his Fabriano counterpart, for all its ornamental splendour, does not quite reach. He stands wrapped in a great cinnabar mantle drawn diagonally across the body, his crowned head slightly lowered, and his expression — “intensa e pensosa” in the words of the museum’s catalogue — hovers between vigilance and inward reflection. Where the young Caspar beside him lifts his face towards the star, Balthazar looks down and ahead, a king who has already seen and is now weighing what he has seen.

The face concentrates the figure’s meaning. Beneath the crown the hair falls in long strands to the shoulders, and the thick beard is dressed into two distinct curls at the chin, a deliberate touch of groomed, almost oriental elegance that individualizes the king within the group’s allegory of the ages. The deep-set eyes, still keeping their painted irises, the strong nose and the faint compression of the mouth produce a physiognomy of real psychological presence, closer to portraiture than the convention of the type requires, and it is in heads such as this that specialists have judged the master the equal of the Pisan sculptors in Nino’s wake.

The right forearm extends with the hand open and cupped, a slender dark fragment of uncertain nature lying across the palm and the gift it once presented lost, while the left arm, also damaged, gathers the mantle against the body; a dark cavity at the breast marks a further loss of material. These mutilations, recorded in the catalogue as missing parts of the arms that held the gift, paradoxically clarify the figure’s original action: like his Fabriano namesake, the Roman Balthazar was caught at the moment of proffering, the vessel extended towards the Child, and the empty hand still performs the gesture six centuries after its object vanished.

The drapery is the master’s most ambitious surviving passage. The cinnabar mantle sweeps from the left shoulder across the torso and descends in a system of long diagonal folds that wrap the legs and break at the base, the red still burning in the hollows where the cloth turns, worn to the pale ground along the ridges; behind, the catalogue records, the mantle falls in vertical folds. Traces of gilding survive across the surface, remnants of the sown ornament that once figured the cloth, so that the statue’s present state, red and ivory in broad painterly zones, is the eroded ghost of a princely brocade.

Technically the figure declares the autograph group’s signature: a single poplar block and the thin gesso preparation that lets the carving speak, as in the young Caspar. The condition, recorded as good with losses of material and paint film, permits the eye to travel from the crisp cutting of the beard to the broad, confident planes of the mantle with almost nothing of later intervention between.

Within the second Adoration, Balthazar stood as the mature term between the young Caspar (inv. 14034) and the lost kneeling elder, converging with them upon the seated Madonna and Child now in Fabriano, whose Child clasps the vessel just received; the St Joseph of this ensemble is likewise lost. Their pairing with the Carifac Madonna, argued by Enrica Neri Lusanna from an archive photograph of the lost Misericordia Virgin and from the matching preparations, remains among the most elegant reconstructions in the study of Trecento wood sculpture.

The church for which the autograph Adoration was carved, presumably in the Marche, remains unknown; the archives of the Museo Artistico-Industriale, where the pair is first recorded in 1906, are the most promising avenue for recovering it.

What the documents cannot supply, the figure itself does: in the pensive Balthazar of Palazzo Venezia, the anonymous master of Fabriano achieved his most complete image of majesty made thoughtful, a king whose lost gift matters less than the deliberation with which he offers it.

The Wider Corpus: Saints, Attributions and Rejections

Around the two Adoration groups a larger corpus has gathered, and here the gradations of certainty matter. At the securely attributed core, accepted by all the scholarship I have consulted, stand the four Fabriano figures, the two Palazzo Venezia Magi and the Madonna formerly in a Florentine private collection, acquired for Fabriano in 2023 (the ‘Carifac Madonna’).

Next comes the Sant’Anatolia of the Museo Diocesano at Camerino, treated in the entry below. Its attribution, dating to Neri Lusanna’s study of 1992, is widely accepted and may be classed as secure or very probable.

A Town in Her Hands: the Sant’Anatolia of Camerino

The crowned woman who stands in the sculpture rooms of the reopened Museo Diocesano of Camerino is a saint carrying a city. On her raised left hand, steadied against the fall of her mantle, sits a miniature walled town bristling with towers, gates and rooftops, and the town has a name: it is Santa Anatolia, the Apennine borgo on the border of Umbria that bore the saint’s own name from the Middle Ages until 1862, when it became Esanatoglia. Anatolia, a third-century virgin martyr whose legend brings her to the Camerino mountains for a hermit’s life before her death by the sword, was the patron of the community, and the statue shows her in the most political of hagiographic roles, the protectress presenting and defending the town entrusted to her. Local scholarship recognizes in this image one of three distinct iconographies of the saint current at Esanatoglia, alongside the martyr with stiletto or banner of the painted tradition, and cites this very sculpture as its principal witness, the formula recurring later in a fresco in San Martino and, tellingly, in a documented San Cataldo of 1475 carved for the same community with the same miniature town.

She stands erect and frontal, the weight barely inflected, in the columnar stance the master reserves for his standing figures. The dress is courtly rather than monastic: a fitted gown patterned overall with dark rosettes on a red ground, edged with broad gilded borders at the square neckline and down the front closure, its long tight sleeves ending in ornamented cuffs. Over it the mantle descends from the shoulders and wraps the lower body in long diagonal sweeps, a dark blue-black fold falling conspicuously over the left wrist beneath the town, and the hem breaks over the feet, of which only a dark toe shows, on a polygonal base. The right hand, lowered and open, once held a second attribute, most plausibly the palm of martyrdom or the sword of her passion, now lost. A tall foliate crown, its points rising like leaves, circles the uncovered head.

The face, as the present surface shows it, is long and grave, with heavy-lidded eyes, a straight nose and a small, serious mouth, framed by waved hair descending to the shoulders. It must be said plainly that this physiognomy, in its current state, reads differently from the taut ovals and abstract half-smiles of the master’s Madonnas and young kings, and the divergence is almost certainly a matter of surface history rather than of invention. The compact, uniformly legible polychromy visible today, with its perfectly preserved rosette pattern and intact gilded borders, has every appearance of a later integral repainting, the ordinary destiny of venerated images in these communities: the comparable San Cataldo of Esanatoglia reached its modern restoration under heavy dirt and successive repaintings. Beneath the repaint, the carved structure, the crown, the fall of the folds, the proportions of the figure, is what the attribution rests on, and it is prudent to remember that any judgment of the face’s modelling from photographs also passes through whatever the repainter’s brush imposed on the original carving.

The attribution itself belongs to the critical reconstruction of the master’s corpus carried out in the early 1990s. Enrica Neri Lusanna’s foundational study of 1992 joined the Sant’Anatolia to the personality she was defining around the Fabriano Adoration, and the entry on the Marche in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale (1997) cited the Camerino statue together with the Misericordia group. The attribution has been maintained since: the statue appeared under the master’s name in the exhibition seasons that rebuilt his catalogue, and the press accounts of the museum’s reopening in October 2025 present her simply as “la trecentesca Sant’Anatolia del Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano”. Within the corpus she therefore occupies the band immediately below the documented core, a securely established attribution of long standing, though one that would benefit, like the whole group, from the technical analyses so far carried out only on the Roman kings.

One genuine discrepancy in the record must be registered rather than smoothed over. While the scholarly literature and the reopening press date the figure to the fourteenth century, at least one ecclesiastical inventory describes the wooden Sant’Anatolia from Esanatoglia in the Camerino museum as a work of the fifteenth, and a separate catalogue record documents yet another wooden Sant’Anatolia of the area, 140 centimetres high, with book and possible sceptre, pendant to a San Nicola by the same hand. The simplest resolution is that the town holds, or held, more than one statue of its patron, of different dates, and that the fifteenth-century dating in the inventory either refers to another figure or repeats an older cataloguing superseded by the attribution to the master; but until the museum’s new records are checked the tangle should be flagged, not silently resolved. What is not in doubt is the identity of the statue photographed here, whose city-bearing iconography matches exactly the sculpture the scholarship assigns to the Maestro dei Magi.

The provenance leads back to Esanatoglia itself, the community whose miniature the saint carries; the church of San Sebastiano has been reported as the specific building, though the diocesan documentation says simply that she comes from the town. Her modern history is that of the diocese’s whole patrimony: displayed in the Museo Diocesano of Camerino, evacuated after the earthquake of 26 October 2016 gravely damaged the city, and returned to view on 16 October 2025, when the museum reopened in the restored Palazzo Arcivescovile beside the cathedral, with the Sant’Anatolia singled out in every account among the treasures brought home.

Within the master’s activity the statue matters for what it adds to his range. The two Adorations show him as the impresario of the sacred group, figures conceived relationally around an enthroned centre; the Sant’Anatolia shows the same workshop supplying the other staple of the region’s demand, the single standing patron for a community altar, conceived frontally, identified by attribute, dressed in the courtly fashion the master’s young kings also wear. If the attribution of the Sant’Elena of 2014 were ever confirmed, the two standing women would frame this register of his production between them; as matters stand, the Camerino statue is its one secure witness, and the geographical hinge of the corpus, carrying the Fabriano workshop’s manner across the mountains into the orbit of Camerino and the Varano lands.

She is also, finally, a document of how these images worked. The town in her hand is not a generic attribute but a portrait of obligation: the community offered its own likeness into the saint’s keeping, and the statue enacted that contract permanently, the protectress holding her charge where every inhabitant could see it. The Sant’Anatolia of the Maestro dei Magi stands at the head of the local tradition of the formula, the earliest surviving statement in wood of Esanatoglia in its patron’s hands.

Two further statues were shown in the Museo Diocesano of Fabriano during the 2021–2022 exhibition as part of the master’s corpus: a St Nicholas of Myra and a St James the Greater. The St Nicholas has local associations with the church of San Niccolò in the Borgo quarter of Fabriano. The St James is now among the most prominent medieval works in the Museo Diocesano. Both were presented by the 2021–2022 curators as the master’s work. I have not been able to consult the catalogue entries that set out the arguments, and I therefore class them as probable attributions of recent scholarship rather than as part of the long-established core.

The Fabriano museum mentions statues attributed to the master in Camerino, in Rome, and at Haarlem, in a “Museo van Stolck”. The Haarlem reference is puzzling. A Museum Van Stolk existed at Haarlem and Scheveningen only from 1902 to 1928, and its collection is now the Atlas Van Stolk at Rotterdam, so the reference may conceal either a slip or a work now elsewhere. I have found no scholarly publication describing a statue by the master in any Dutch museum. Until such a publication is identified, the claim must be treated as unverified.

A category of its own is formed by the statue called Sant’Elena, attributed to the master and named as Helena by the curator of the 2014 exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile; the name is as unconfirmed as the attribution. Contemporary reports described it as “scoperta recentemente” and presented it as a last-minute attribution. The statue is in private hands and is treated in the entry below. Its provenance, cleaning and date rest on exhibition reporting, and the attribution should be regarded as a hypothesis advanced in an exhibition context, not as part of the accepted corpus.

A Saint at the Edge of the Corpus: the So-Called Sant’Elena

The standing woman who appeared in the final rooms of the Fabriano exhibition of 2014 was the surprise of that show: a life-size figure in painted poplar, presented to the public as a new attribution to the Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano and named as St Helena, the mother of Constantine and finder of the True Cross. She stands upright on a low base, her weight subtly shifted, her head turned a few degrees from the axis of the body, and she looks out with the long almond eyes, small mouth and faint, self-contained smile that recur across the master’s Madonnas and young kings. Her braided hair is coiled about the head, but the photograph shows no crown, so that no sign of imperial rank survives; the attribute that would have confirmed her identity, presumably the Cross or one of its nails, remains only as a dark fragmentary stump between the fingers of the left hand at the hip, while the right hand hangs lowered and empty. The identification of the subject is therefore a second hypothesis laid over the first. Helena is normally recognized by her crown and by the Cross; here the crown is absent and the stump in the hand could belong to any of the attributes given to female saints, a palm, a book, a vase, a Cross. What remains is a young woman in courtly dress with a lost attribute, a figure that fits a good many virgin martyrs and holy women as well as an empress. The accounts of the exhibition that I have seen do not say what led to the name, whether an inscription, an inventory, the provenance or the curator’s reading, and I have found no argument for it in print. The statue is thus at the edge of the corpus twice over: it is doubtful whose work she is, and doubtful whom she represents. In what follows the name Sant’Elena is used as the exhibition’s label and not as an established identification.

The costume is the statue’s most arresting feature, and it sets her apart from every other figure in the master’s orbit. She wears not the timeless mantled dress of the Madonnas but the fitted court fashion of the later Trecento: a snug green-toned bodice closed by a line of buttons down the breast, ornamented at the collar and across the chest with applied bosses, over a skirt whose surface carries a dense all-over pattern, with a mantle drawn around the left arm and hip in long diagonal sweeps that break into angular folds towards the feet. Sandalled toes emerge below the hem. According to the accounts published at the time of the exhibition, small alveoli are visible across the garment, sockets that once held inset stones or glass pastes, so that the saint, whoever she is, originally glittered with applied jewels over her painted and gilded brocade, an effect of courtly sumptuousness that even the worn present surface still intimates.

The modern history of the statue, as far as it can be reconstructed from the exhibition reporting, is brief and not fully consistent. One account has the work arriving from a Bavarian castle and found by the exhibition’s curator with an antiquarian; another describes it as coming from a private collection at Bastia Umbra. The two are not necessarily incompatible, a German provenance and an Umbrian owner being easily sequential, but no documented chain of ownership has been published, and nothing at all is known of the church or region for which the figure was originally carved. The same reports state that the statue reached its finder under six layers of later repainting, removed mechanically with the scalpel, the overpaint having paradoxically protected the original surface beneath; the polychromy now visible would thus be substantially Trecento, though no technical report of the cleaning has appeared in print.

The attribution itself was advanced by the curator of the exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile (Fabriano, Pinacoteca Civica, 2014–2015), where the statue was shown as a late addition alongside the reunited Misericordia group and the two kings from Palazzo Venezia, with a proposed dating of 1375–1378 that would place it at the end of the master’s documented span. Seen against that company, the stylistic case is not frivolous: the physiognomy stands close to the young Caspar of the Roman group, the play of a patterned undergarment against a diagonally swept mantle recalls the young king of the Misericordia ensemble, and the taste for surfaces enriched with applied ornament is consistent with the double-gesso decoration of the Fabriano statues. The courtly naturalism of the dress, more pronounced here than anywhere else in the corpus, could be read as the late development of a sculptor whose younger kings already wore the fashions of their day.

The case for caution is nonetheless strong, and it must govern how the statue is published. The attribution has never been examined in a peer-reviewed study; it does not appear in the critical apparatus by which the corpus was built, from Enrica Neri Lusanna’s reconstructions of 1992 and 2002 to the Palazzo Venezia catalogue entry of 2025, which discusses the master’s securely attributed works without mention of a Sant’Elena; and the technical claims, the six strata of overpaint, the alveoli, the proposed date, rest entirely on journalistic accounts of the exhibition. Until the statue receives a proper scholarly publication, with photographs before and after cleaning, analysis of wood and preparation comparable to that carried out on the Roman kings, and a reasoned stylistic argument, it belongs to the hypothetical margin of the corpus, not to its core.

That margin has its own interest, however, for what it reveals about how the master’s identity is negotiated. The corpus of an anonymous sculptor is a critical construction, built outward from an eponymous nucleus by chains of comparison, and every proposed addition tests the coherence of the construction itself. The Sant’Elena poses the test in its sharpest form, since both her author and her subject are in question: if accepted, she would extend the master’s range from the sacred theatre of the Adoration to the single standing saint in contemporary dress, and would carry his activity firmly into the later 1370s, in suggestive proximity to the final documented years of Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo, whose identification with the master itself remains unproven. If rejected, she would become instead a witness to a second Fabriano-orbit workshop working in the master’s idiom, which the sources in any case attest for the city.

Technically the figure aligns, so far as visual inspection allows, with the master’s autograph manner rather than with the Misericordia replica: the surface reads as paint over a preparation thin enough to let the carving of the folds speak, and the ornament, where it survives, is painted and applied rather than built up in relieved gesso. The condition is that of a statue that has passed through centuries of parish devotion and repainting: abrasion across the raised folds, losses to the attribute and to the applied stones, a general flattening of the once-jewelled surface. What survives best is what matters most, the head, whose carving, seen even in exhibition photographs, has the taut oval, the crisp brows and the ambiguous half-smile that constitute the master’s most personal signature.

Pending the study she deserves, the Sant’Elena is best presented exactly as she stood in 2014: a fascinating proposal at the edge of the corpus, plausible in physiognomy and costume, unverified in provenance, technique, print and in the identity of the subject. She offers something rare: not a settled masterpiece but an attribution in progress, with the evidence laid out and the verdict honestly suspended.

Invention and Replica: Chronology and the Workshop

The title of Neri Lusanna’s first study, “Invenzione e replica nella scultura del Trecento”, identified the central interpretative problem posed by the master. The surviving evidence shows that the same composition, the Adoration of the Magi with a seated Madonna, standing and kneeling kings and a St Joseph, was carved at least twice in near-identical form, with variations in the degree of narrative animation and in the refinement of the surface. This is a phenomenon well known in painting, where workshops repeated successful compositions, but rarer and less studied in life-size sculpture. It implies a workshop organized to produce replicas on demand, using patterns or models transmitted from the master’s invention to assistants. It also implies patrons in more than one location wanting the same devotional apparatus.

The logic of the reconstruction points to a sequence rather than to simultaneity. The group reconstructed from Rome and Florence, with its finer preparation, its livelier Child and its greater formal invention, has been judged the master’s own. The Fabriano group, with its thicker gesso, its more rigid Child and its somewhat duller outlines, reflects greater workshop participation. It does not follow automatically that the finer group is earlier. A master might produce his most refined version after a first, workshop-assisted essay, or the workshop might replicate a prototype years later. The published literature places both groups within the 1360s and 1370s. The Fabriano museum gives only “second half of the fourteenth century”. No document dates any of the groups. The chronology therefore rests on stylistic comparison with dated paintings, above all Nuzi’s, and on the general development of central Italian sculpture after Nino Pisano.

If the identification with Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo were accepted, his documented activity from 1365 to about 1385 would frame the whole corpus neatly. It would also give the workshop a home in the Olivetan monastery of Santa Caterina. The circularity must be recognized, however: the dating of the sculptures is sometimes invoked to support the identification, and the identification then to confirm the dating. Independent evidence for the chronology comes only from stylistic affinities with painting. The most important of these is the relationship with Nuzi, whose death in 1373 provides a terminus for any direct collaboration.

What can be said with more confidence is that the master’s development, as far as the corpus allows us to see it, runs from a strict, almost archaic frontality in the Madonnas, what Neri Lusanna called the idol’s smile, towards increasingly animated narrative gestures in the secondary figures: the Child who turns back to the giver, the Magus who points to the star. This tension between hieratic centre and narrative periphery is not necessarily chronological. It may be a deliberate compositional strategy, preserving the cult image’s frontality while allowing the surrounding actors to perform. It is nonetheless one of the defining features of the master’s art.

Sources and Models: Nino Pisano, Allegretto Nuzi and the Painter’s Hand

Neri Lusanna’s reading of the master’s formation places him in the wake of Andrea and Nino Pisano. The Pisani worked at Orvieto Cathedral from 1347 to 1349, when Nino succeeded his father in the works, and so were active in the Umbrian region adjacent to the Marche at precisely the moment the master’s generation was forming. The comparison most often adduced is with Nino Pisano’s statue of the Eucharistic Christ in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo at Orvieto, whose frontal composure and softly falling drapery offer a plausible source for the Madonnas. Specialists outside Italy have gone so far as to judge the Maestro dei Magi, in quality, the equal of his Pisan contemporaries in Nino’s wake. Whether the master trained in Tuscany or Umbria, or absorbed Pisan models through intermediaries in the Marche, is not known. The Marchigian encyclopedia account records Nino-inflected marble Madonnas at Monte San Giusto and elsewhere in the region, evidence that the idiom was available locally.

The relationship with Allegretto Nuzi is closer and more contentious. At the most general level all scholars agree that the master’s sculpture shows “diversi punti di tangenza con la pittura di Allegretto Nuzi”, in the formula of the Palazzo Venezia catalogue: in the tenderness of gesture, the care for detail and the richness of textile ornament. The 2021–2022 exhibition went further, presenting the master’s work in the final room of its itinerary as “la scultura al tempo di Allegretto”. According to reviews, the exhibition catalogue argued forcefully that the polychromy of the statues may be ascribed to Nuzi himself, or at least to the universe of painted textiles he created. The hypothesis is attractive. It rests on the well-documented medieval practice by which painters painted sculptures carved by others, and on the close resemblance between the gessoed and painted brocades of the statues and those of Nuzi’s panels. It remains a hypothesis. No document records Nuzi’s payment for painting a statue, and the technical distinction between the two groups’ preparations suggests that the polychromy was not uniform across the corpus.

This point matters because a simplified version of the hypothesis has entered general reference works. Some state as fact that Nuzi “painted some wooden statues” now in the Pinacoteca, and one popular reference presents the Adoration group as “an example of this activity of Allegretto’s workshop”. These statements convert a scholarly proposal into a settled attribution. They should be corrected to the more cautious formula that the polychromy of the statues has been related to Nuzi or to his workshop, and that some scholars believe the painter himself may have been involved.

Errors, Confusions and Legends

Several persistent errors surround the master and should be explicitly debunked.

The first is the categorical error with which this essay began: the notion that the Maestro dei Magi was a painter, or that he is named after a painted Adoration. He is a sculptor, and his name derives from a wooden group.

The second concerns homonyms. The name “Maestro dell’Adorazione dei Magi” has been applied to other anonymous artists, among them the author of frescoes in the south-western apsidiole of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, dated around 1360 and later. There is no connection between that Lombard painter and the Fabriano sculptor. Nor should the Fabriano master be confused with the many anonymous painters of Adorations in the International Gothic idiom of Gentile da Fabriano’s circle. Gentile’s own Strozzi Adoration of 1423 has cast a long shadow over the search term.

The third concerns the sculptor’s name. An online review of the 2014 exhibition calls him “Fra’ Giovanni di Girolamo, conosciuto come Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano”. This is an error for Giovanni di Bartolomeo and has no documentary basis.

The fourth concerns the fate of the Misericordia Madonna, and here the sources genuinely conflict. The Pinacoteca states that the Madonna and Child was stolen in the 1950s, reappeared on the antiques market and is “attualmente conservata negli Stati Uniti”. The English-language catalogue entry of 2004 states that the Madonna of the Fabriano group “is lost”, known only from the old photograph in the Florentine photographic archive. A review of the 2021–2022 exhibition states that the Virgin and Child which belonged to the Adoration shown in Fabriano ended up “in collezione Cini a Monselice”. The Palazzo Venezia bibliography cites a 2016 essay on Vittorio Cini as a collector of sculpture, which suggests that the Cini collection holds, or held, a work related to the master. The three claims cannot all be correct. The Cini hypothesis has the support of recent scholarly attention, while the American location is unsupported by any publication I have found. Readers should not accept any of them without verification.

A fifth, related confusion must be forestalled. On 10 March 1977 a Madonna and Child was stolen from the castle of Monselice, then belonging to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. It was recovered by the Carabinieri at Zogno, near Bergamo, and put back on display at Monselice from 27 March 2026. The press release of the Regione del Veneto and the Castello di Monselice (March 2026) dates it to “attorno al secondo decennio del XV secolo”, and other reporting assigns it to Pisan-Lucchese workshops close to the Sienese sculptor Francesco di Valdambrino. It is not a work of the Maestro dei Magi, and its recovery has no bearing on the fate of the Misericordia Madonna, despite the shared Cini and Monselice associations.

The sixth error is the statement that the Florentine Madonna “returned” to Fabriano in 2023. It came to Fabriano, but there is no evidence that it was ever there before. On the accepted reconstruction it belonged to the group whose Magi are in Rome, and that group’s original location is unknown.

Fortuna Critica and Open Problems

The critical fortune of the Maestro dei Magi is brief and concentrated. The Misericordia figures must have been known locally for centuries, but they entered the scholarly literature as a group in need of an author only in the twentieth century. Sassi’s article of 1955 was the first attempt to give them a name, and it did so by proposing an archival candidate rather than by stylistic reconstruction. For almost four decades the proposal remained local. The major surveys of Italian wood sculpture in the mid-twentieth century did not engage it in any sustained way that I have been able to trace.

The decisive turn came in 1992, with Neri Lusanna’s study in Studi di storia dell’arte. It reconstructed the master’s personality, coined the name “Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano” in its now-standard form, and posed the problem of invention and replica. Her contributions of 1994 and 2002 extended the corpus to the Rome group and the Florentine Madonna. The 1993 regional survey of sculpture in the Marche gave Donnini the opportunity to reassert the Olivetan identification. The two lines, the anonymous stylistic reconstruction and the archival identification, have since run in parallel.

Exhibitions have played an outsized role. I legni devoti (Fabriano, 1993–1994), Sacri legni (Montalto Marche, 2006), Da Giotto a Gentile (Fabriano, 2014) and Allegretto Nuzi e il ‘300 a Fabriano (Fabriano, 2021–2022) each brought the master’s works together and each advanced new proposals. The 2014 exhibition, broadly favourable to the identification, added the Sant’Elena. The 2021–2022 exhibition placed the master in the closest possible relation to Nuzi and assembled the largest group of his works yet seen together. The acquisition of the Florentine Madonna by the Fondazione Carifac in 2023 now brings the Madonna of the second Adoration to Fabriano, where it can be studied beside the Misericordia ensemble; the two kings of the same group remain in Rome.

Several problems remain open, and they may serve as an agenda for future research. The first is the documentary problem. A new edition, with full transcription and commentary, of the documents concerning Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo published by Sassi and Donnini, together with the notarial material gathered in 1997, would allow the identification to be assessed on its merits, and in particular the reported commission of a painted presepe. The second is the fate of the Misericordia Madonna, where the three conflicting claims could perhaps be resolved by publishing the Florentine archive photograph alongside any Cini-collection sculpture of comparable type. The third is the original location of the Roman group: the archives of the Museo Artistico-Industriale might reveal where its figures were acquired before 1906. The fourth is technical. A comparative study of the gesso preparations, pigments and wood species of all the figures in the corpus would place the distinction between master and workshop on firmer ground, building on the analyses already undertaken for the Roman Magi. The fifth concerns the polychromy and its authorship: whether Nuzi or his workshop painted any of these figures can only be decided, if at all, by technical comparison with his panels.

Until these problems are resolved the most accurate account of the master is a layered one. At the documented level stands an Olivetan monk, Giovanni di Bartolomeo, active as a sculptor in Fabriano from 1365. At the securely attributed level stands a corpus of two Adoration groups, one in Fabriano and one divided between Rome and Fabriano, carved in poplar and richly painted in the 1360s–1370s, together with the Sant’Anatolia of Camerino. At the probable level stand the saints exhibited in 2021–2022. At the hypothetical level stand the Sant’Elena, whose subject is as doubtful as her author, the identification of the master with the monk, and Nuzi’s personal involvement in the polychromy. And at the level of error stand the painter, the American Madonna, and the confusion with the Monselice theft. The Maestro dei Magi deserves a place in the history of Italian Gothic sculpture whatever his name. For the study of Fabriano, his significance is that he reveals, alongside the painted record, a city capable in the decades of Allegretto Nuzi of staging the sacred in wood and colour on a scale and with a refinement that bear comparison with Tuscany.

Conclusion

The essay began by correcting a category, and the correction is the first thing a reader should carry away. The Maestro dei Magi di Fabriano is a sculptor in wood, and the habit of filing him among the panel painters of Trecento Fabriano obscures what he offers: evidence that a city best known for Allegretto Nuzi and Francescuccio Ghissi also sustained a life-size, polychrome sculpture of the first rank. His name is a critical convenience, coined in 1992 for an anonymous hand and taken from a wooden group, not from a document or a signature. Everything said about him since rests on that construction, and the reader is entitled to ask, at each step, whether the evidence supports the link or the habit of comparison does.

The firmest result of the scholarship is also the least obvious. It is that the same Adoration, with its enthroned Madonna, its three kings of different ages and its withdrawn Joseph, was carved twice, and that the two versions can be told apart. The finer of them, divided between Rome and Fabriano, has a thin preparation that follows the cut of the wood and a Child who turns towards the giver; the version from the Misericordia has a thick, relief-worked gesso and a stiffer axis. Neri Lusanna’s distinction between invention and replica rests on photographs, on preparations and on the handling of drapery, and each of these can be inspected again. It describes a workshop organised to repeat a successful devotional apparatus, which is rare enough in life-size Trecento sculpture to justify the master’s place in the history of the period without any further claim.

The question of his name is different in kind, and the essay has tried to keep the two questions apart. Sassi’s discovery of an Olivetan monk-sculptor documented in Fabriano from 1365 is an archival fact, and a valuable one, whatever became of the attribution built on it. The difficulty is an asymmetry: there is a name without a work, and a body of works without a name. No document ties Fra’ Giovanni di Bartolomeo to any surviving statue, and the dating of the sculptures has at times been used to support the identification, which was then used to confirm the dating. Until the documents are edited afresh, the honest formula is that the monk existed and worked, that the master’s figures belong to the same decades and the same city, and that the coincidence, though not negligible, is not proof.

The relationship with painting is the other point at which the evidence is thinner than the reputation. That the master’s brocades, borders and sown ornament translate into three dimensions the gold-figured silks of Nuzi’s panels is beyond dispute, and it is the most persuasive reason for placing him in Nuzi’s generation. That Nuzi or his workshop painted the statues is an attractive hypothesis that no payment, contract or technical comparison has yet confirmed, and the different preparations of the two groups suggest that the polychromy was not uniform across the corpus. The right conclusion is a narrow one: carving and painting stood so close in this city that the boundary between them is hard to draw, and a statue can be a painter’s model without being a painter’s work.

A corpus of this kind grows outward from a nucleus, and the edges show how the method works. The four Fabriano figures, the two Roman kings and the Carifac Madonna form the core on which the critics agree. The Sant’Anatolia of Camerino stands immediately beyond it, a long-standing attribution whose surface has probably been repainted and whose judgment therefore rests on structure more than on the face. The saints exhibited in 2021–2022 and the Sant’Elena belong to progressively less secure bands, the last resting on exhibition reporting alone and naming a subject that no surviving attribute confirms. Publishing these gradations openly is not a matter of caution for its own sake: each addition tests the coherence of the whole, and an attribution that is presented as settled before it has been studied damages the works around it.

It would also be a mistake to make the master the lone genius of Fabriano sculpture. The encyclopedia account of the Marche speaks of a school of carvers whose figural decoration touched that of Nuzi, and the Calvary of the Beati Becchetti shows a different, northern sensibility at work in the same city a generation later. The Olivetan house of Santa Caterina makes it credible that a monk-artist worked within a network of artisan and mercantile families, but it does not tell us which works he carved. What the material supports is a plural culture, of which the Maestro dei Magi is the best documented by his works and the least documented by his person.

The modern history of the objects has shaped the study of them as much as the fourteenth century did. The Misericordia Madonna is known only from an old photograph, and three incompatible accounts of its fate circulate; the Roman kings can be followed no further back than 1906; the Carifac Madonna, which came to Fabriano in 2023, has been described as returning to a place it is not known ever to have occupied. Reference works have converted hypotheses into facts, the Monselice theft has been confused with the Misericordia loss, and a reviewer has renamed the monk. These errors are not incidental. They mark the points at which a subject with few documents invites its readers to supply what is missing, and they are the best argument for the care with which the evidence has been graded here.

What survives, in the end, is a way of staging the sacred. The kneeling king who has surrendered his gift, the crowned Balthazar who points to the star, the young king who still holds his vessel, the Joseph who thinks apart from the scene: these are figures conceived to be met at the beholder’s own height, in real space, in a procession already under way. Whether their author was a monk of Santa Caterina, a lay carver of the city or a name not yet found, that achievement stands on the objects, and the Misericordia ensemble and the second group’s Madonna now stand in the same city, for the first time. The name may never be recovered; the work has never depended on it, and a reader can cite the master under his conventional name, with the monk as one scholarly proposal, without waiting for the documents to speak.