Maestro di Campodonico

Introduction: an anonymous master and his name

Few fourteenth-century painters of central Italy have been so admired and so little documented. The Master of Campodonico, also called the “Master of San Biagio in Caprile”, is a name of convenience, what German scholarship calls a Notname. It is taken from a place, not a person. Campodonico is a small upland hamlet in the territory of Fabriano, on the Apennine border between the Marche and Umbria. Near it stands the former Benedictine abbey of San Biagio in Caprile, whose church once held the painter’s most important work. The name therefore records where the work was found, not who painted it. Popular texts that treat “Campodonico” as a surname are wrong.

The painter has earned his reputation. Enrica Neri Lusanna’s entry in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale (1997) is still the most authoritative synthesis. It describes a personality “di grande rilievo culturale e tenuta formale, che non ha paralleli nella pittura marchigiana del momento”. In 1963 Federico Zeri published the article in which he added a panel painting to the corpus. There he placed the anonymous painter “sullo stesso piano di quei cinque o sei autentici geni della generazione fra il 1320 e il 1350”. The Pinacoteca Civica “Bruno Molajoli” in Fabriano, where the name-piece now hangs, cites the regional survey L’arte nelle Marche (1929). That survey called the master “la più alta espressione della tradizione giottesca in ambito marchigiano”.

The literature on this painter is small. Even so, it contains a surprising number of errors that have been repeated until they look like facts. Correcting them is part of the task.

Fabriano and its territory in the Trecento

In the first half of the fourteenth century Fabriano was a free commune in the March of Ancona, nominally part of the Papal States. It lay on the eastern slope of the Umbro-Marchigian Apennine, where roads from the Adriatic climbed towards the passes into Umbria. Those roads connected it with Gubbio, Gualdo Tadino, Nocera and Foligno, and beyond them with Assisi and Perugia. For the history of painting this geography matters. The Fabriano basin looked west across the mountains at least as much as east to the sea.

The town lived on crafts and trade, above all paper-making, for which Fabriano was already known across Europe. Politically, the Trecento saw the Chiavelli family rise. In the second half of the century they turned their influence into formal lordship. Inside the walls stood the churches of the mendicant orders: the Franciscans, the Augustinian hermits at Sant’Agostino and the Dominicans at San Domenico. In the countryside stood older Benedictine abbeys, among them Santa Maria d’Appennino, San Biagio in Caprile and Sant’Emiliano in Congiuntoli. By the fourteenth century these houses were often short of money, but they could still commission large decorative programmes.

Critics usually treat Fabriano’s painting of this period as the first phase of a “Fabriano school”. That school runs on through Allegretto Nuzi and Francescuccio di Cecco Ghissi and ends in Gentile da Fabriano. The Master of Campodonico and the Master of Sant’Emiliano are generally seen as the two most important anonymous painters of the first phase. Both took up, in different ways, the new language worked out in the workshop of the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. The Master of Sant’Emiliano leaned towards Rimini. The Master of Campodonico owed more to Assisi itself. The Black Death of 1348 falls within the later part of his likely career. No source, however, links his work, or its end, to the plague, and claims that it does are speculation.

San Biagio in Caprile and Abbot Pietro

The abbey of San Biagio in Caprile lies in the Salmaregia valley near Campodonico, in a landscape of woods and pasture. Its early history is known chiefly through local historiography, summarised in the study La valle di Somaregia o Salmaregia (2nd edition, Fabriano 1989), which dates the foundation to around 1030, attributes it to the counts of Nocera and Gualdo, and records that the house was placed under the authority of Santa Maria d’Appennino around 1060. The epithet “in Caprile” is traditionally explained by the presence of goat-folds nearby, a plausible folk etymology that cannot, however, be verified.

The same compilations report notes drawn from the communal archive of Fabriano, according to which the monastery was already in existence in 1035 and, on 7 August 1338, sold nine plots of land in the district of Nebbiano in order to settle its debts. If this information is accurate, it casts an interesting light on the commission that followed: the community that paid for a monumental fresco in 1345 had been obliged, only a few years earlier, to alienate part of its property to meet its obligations.

The later history of the abbey explains why so little of its documentation survives. In 1443 a fire destroyed the monastery together with its archive, and under Eugenius IV the house passed to the Silvestrine congregation. It became a titular abbey in 1665 and was sold into private hands in 1810. What remains today is essentially the church, a single long and narrow barrel-vaulted hall built of local limestone. Consolidated in the 1980s and again in the late 1990s, it is now the property of the commune, but its walls, stripped of their paintings, are bare.

The abbot under whom the Crucifixion was painted is named in the inscription beneath it in abbreviated form, as “D. P. AB.” (Domini Petri abbatis). In the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale Neri Lusanna identifies him as head of the monastery from 1336, citing her own study of 1995. Local historiography based on the study of 1989 allows this bare indication to be filled out into a fuller narrative. In the early 1330s the abbey was governed by Abbot Morico, son of Baliguccio d’Orsara, who was reportedly drawn into the Guelph–Ghibelline conflicts of around 1328; after the reconciliation with the papacy in 1331, he and his community performed penance, including a pilgrimage to Rome. Among the members of the chapter at that time was a monk named Pietro di Bartoluccio. On Morico’s death in 1335, Pietro di Bartoluccio da Serradica was elected in his place and travelled to Avignon to regularise his position, and a bull of Benedict XII dated 13 May 1337 is said to have confirmed the election. Pietro last appears in a document of 24 June 1347, and on 31 August 1349 Clement VI appointed a monk, Giovanni da Fabriano, to succeed him as abbot.

This sequence is consistent both with the inscription of 1345 and with Neri Lusanna’s “from 1336”, the slight discrepancy between the dates being readily explained by an election in 1335–36 followed by papal confirmation in 1337. I have not, however, been able to check either the bull of 1337 or the document of 1347 against the papal registers or the original archives, and both are reported here as the findings of local historiography rather than as documents I have verified. The identification of the inscription’s “P.” with Pietro di Bartoluccio is therefore very probable, but it depends on the soundness of this reconstruction.

A further caution is in order. The abbot’s patronymic, “di Bartoluccio”, happens to coincide with the name later proposed for the painter, yet nothing in the sources I have consulted connects the two. Bartoluccio was a common name, and the same local historiography mentions other Bartolucci among the abbey’s benefactors. The coincidence, however tempting, is not evidence.

Frescoes in the Pinacoteca Civica, Fabriano

Nothing of the master’s work remains in San Biagio in Caprile. What survives of the decoration of the abbey church is two detached groups: the monumental Crucifixion from the end wall, dated 1345 by its inscription, and a painted niche with an Annunciation, a Flagellation and the saints of the abbey. Both entered the literature in 1915, and the State acquired them together in 1966. They belong to the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, but since the exhibition of 2014 they have been on deposit at the Pinacoteca Civica “Bruno Molajoli” in Fabriano, the town in whose territory they were painted.

Together they are the core of the master’s catalogue. The Crucifixion is his only dated work and the fixed point on which every other attribution depends. The niche, dated by its association with it, shows the same painter at close range, in devotional images meant to be seen from a few steps away. The sections that follow look first at the Crucifixion, then at the niche as a whole, and then at its individual figures: the Annunciation, the saints of the arch and the two patrons of the community, Blaise and Benedict.

The Crucifixion of San Biagio in Caprile (1345): Grief, Stone and Light

The official catalogue record provides a useful inventory from which to begin. It lists Christ crucified, the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, John the Evangelist, Longinus, the holy women, God the Father, angels, a number of unnamed male figures, a horse and a rocky landscape, and it identifies as attributes the cross, Longinus’s lance, a sword and the chalices held by the angels. It records no donor, and none is to be seen in the painting: the patron is present only in the words of the inscription, which commemorates the abbot without portraying him.

The image occupies a round-headed field enclosed within a painted frame. The outer band imitates red marble set with lozenge inlays, while within it a pale moulded arch recedes towards the picture, so that the scene appears to open through the wall rather than to lie upon its surface. Within this illusionistic opening the composition is divided into two zones by a band of white, softly modelled clouds.

The upper zone is dominated by a large circular glory with a deep red rim, within which a figure extends its arms. This is the God the Father of the catalogue, though he is now badly worn and his head almost entirely lost. The written sources leave open whether he was framed by a mandorla; the painting itself settles the question, for the glory is a full circle rather than the almond-shaped form. On either side of it, two groups of haloed figures stand upon the clouds, those at the left in rose and red garments crossed by pale bands, among them at least one bearded head, those at the right in paler greens and creams. The abrasion of the surface forbids any secure identification, and they may be angels, saints or prophets; whatever their identity, they compose a heavenly court that presides over the sacrifice enacted below.

In the lower zone the body of Christ rises from the rocks of Golgotha against a sky that the Pinacoteca describes as monochrome and “almost timeless”, a field of dense, dark blue without a horizon. The museum’s account insists on the extreme anatomical tension of the body, on its lean musculature and on its translucent, almost transfigured flesh, and the painting bears out each of these observations. The arms are stretched almost level along the crossbar and the head sinks towards the right shoulder; the abdomen is drawn in, the ribs are exposed, and the crossed feet are fixed by a single nail. The flesh is a pale, almost greenish white, and a transparent loincloth, fluttering to one side, supplies the only movement in an otherwise motionless figure. Anyone familiar with the Crucifixions of the Lower Church at Assisi will recognise the type. This is not the serenely sagging Christ of the older Giottesque formula but a body whose weight and strain are registered in the tension of the arms and the ribcage.

Small angels circle the cross. One at the right, with golden wings, holds a bowl towards Christ’s left hand, while another, robed in white, hovers at the left. These are the chalice-bearing angels named in the catalogue, gathering the blood from the wounds, and the eucharistic motif binds the painted sacrifice to the Mass celebrated at the altar beneath it. The sky also contains two details that the written sources pass over. At the right, level with the angels, two white letters can be made out, apparently “PO”. They form no part of the inscription below, and on the present evidence their meaning cannot be established: they may be the remnant of a lost painted text or a later mark, and neither possibility can be confirmed without direct examination of the surface. Near both edges of the sky, moreover, float pale and barely legible figures and shapes, which may be all that survives of the horse and of the other figures recorded in the catalogue but no longer clearly readable.

Beneath the cross the composition divides into two groups. The passage singled out in every description, and rightly so, is the swooning Virgin. She collapses with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, supported on either side by the holy women, whose angular draperies seem, in the words of the museum’s text, to become “un tutt’uno con il paesaggio petroso”. The ochre and golden mantles fuse into a single mass, and their stiff, broken folds continue the faceted planes of the rock, so that grief and stone assume the same form and the landscape itself participates in the drama. A tall, pale outcrop closes the group at the left. At the foot of the cross the Magdalene kneels in a rose-red mantle, embracing the upright and pressing her face against the wood, a figure painted with what the museum calls a “realismo popolaresco”. To the right Saint John stands alone on a projecting ledge, wrapped in a pink mantle, raising a hand to his face in the traditional gesture of sorrow as he looks up at Christ; his upright and isolated figure answers the dense group of women on the other side of the cross.

At the far right stands Longinus, in a short tunic that leaves his sturdy legs bare, holding the long shaft of the lance upright. Unusually, he is haloed. According to tradition, the soldier who pierced Christ’s side recognised his divinity at that very moment, and later died a martyr and was venerated as a saint. The halo therefore shows that the painter chose to represent him as already converted: he gazes up at the cross, his office as executioner already behind him. Two older bearded onlookers in ochre stand at his back, one of them wearing a tall pointed cap.

This side of the scene takes up, in condensed form, the crowded narrative Golgotha that Pietro Lorenzetti had developed at Assisi. The encyclopaedia’s reading accords closely with what the painting shows: a composition orchestrated with great complexity, in which form and colour are fused, and a refined sensibility for colour, “nonostante le gravi perdite”, and for light. In its view these qualities reflect a meditation on Giotto at Assisi and on his workshop, Puccio Capanna among them, combined with the narrative skill learned from Pietro Lorenzetti. At Campodonico, however, the crowd has been reduced to a few monumental figures, and the soldier has become a saint.

The encyclopaedia’s qualification, “despite the serious losses”, deserves to be taken seriously. A long, irregular lacuna runs diagonally from the crown of the arch through the upper left of the sky and past the left arm of the cross, and large patches filled in a neutral tone interrupt the rocks in the lower corners and at the foot of the cross. A faint horizontal seam crosses the whole surface just above the crossbar, probably a join left by the mounting of the detached painting. None of this is surprising in a work that stood on the wall of a rural church later burned, abandoned and sold, and that was subsequently detached, remounted and restored at least once, most recently in a campaign of consolidation and pictorial reintegration carried out at Urbino. Much of the final layers of colour has certainly been lost or thinned, and what survives is the design and much of the modelling rather than the finished surface.

The inscription band along the lower edge, divided into two parts by a central element, has suffered in the same way and is only partly legible. The official transcription reads it as:

HOC OP. FACT. FUIT TEMPORE D. P. AB. ANNO D. MCCCXLV,

that is,

Hoc op(us) fact(um) fuit tempore D(omini) P(etri) ab(batis) anno D(omini) MCCCXLV:

“This work was made in the time of the lord abbot Pietro, in the year of the Lord 1345.” Its lettering and its implications are discussed below.

Even so, the force of the work is not difficult to understand. The Pinacoteca speaks of “grande forza espressiva, quasi espressionistica” and of “volumetria potente e compatta”, and the phrases are apt. The figures possess real bulk: they stand upon the ground and turn in space, and their gestures of collapse, of clinging and of upward gazing read clearly from a distance. This legibility mattered in a long, narrow nave, where a painting on the end wall had to be read from the door. What distinguishes the master from most painters of his region and generation is precisely this capacity to hold together a large surface, a numerous cast of figures and a sustained pitch of emotion.

The painting entered the literature in 1915 with “A traverso le Marche” (L’Arte 18, pp. 1–28), having been, in the encyclopaedia’s phrase, “rinvenuto durante la periegesi marchigiana”, found in the course of that tour of the region. Its subsequent history is less well documented. The only secure date is supplied by the ICCD, which records that the State acquired the Caprile cycle in 1966. A popular lecture text published online in 2015 adds that the frescoes were detached from the end wall in 1962 and exhibited at Urbino from 1964; I have found no scholarly or archival confirmation of either date, although neither contradicts the purchase, since an emergency detachment may well have preceded it. Local sources further maintain that the removal to Urbino was presented as temporary, with a promise that the frescoes would return, but this belongs to local memory rather than to the documentary record.

The question of where the painting is has caused lasting confusion, largely because ownership and location have diverged. The Crucifixion is State property held by the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, which is why the ICCD still gives Urbino as its place of conservation. Physically, however, it has been in Fabriano since the exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile. Pittura e scultura a Fabriano fra Due e Trecento, which opened on 26 July 2014 at the Pinacoteca and in three churches of the town and was extended to 18 January 2015.

The Galleria appears in the lenders’ list as the source of the Crucifixion, and at the close of the exhibition the Caprile frescoes remained in Fabriano on deposit. In January 2022 Il Resto del Carlino reported that the municipal council had approved a new agreement keeping “l’Annunciazione, Flagellazione di Cristo e Santi e la Crocifissione” at the Pinacoteca “for another five years”, the mayor adding that strained relations with the Galleria’s management had nearly cost the city the works in early 2017. Guidebooks, the municipal website and the 1997 encyclopaedia that place the painting “in Urbino” are therefore out of date as a guide to where it can be seen; since the deposit is temporary and renewable, visitors would nonetheless do well to confirm its current status.

The San Biagio Niche: Annunciation, Flagellation and the Saints of the Abbey

The second group from San Biagio is a niche, also on deposit in Fabriano. The ICCD records it as inventory 1990 D 13, State property, under the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, and dates it 1345. That date comes from its link to the Crucifixion, not from any inscription on the niche, so it should read “c. 1345”. The attribution goes back to the 1915 survey and to L’arte nelle Marche (1929), and no one disputes it.

The niche is a complete painted space. The museum has kept its three-dimensional form, mounting it on a dark plinth so that the visitor stands in front of it as the monks once did. It is 339 cm high, 249 cm wide and 61 cm deep, and it has a round head. Every surface is painted: the back wall, the curved intrados of the arch, and the side walls. This is rare for a detached fresco. The group of paintings stays a single architectural object and does not break into separate images, so the relations the painter set up between the walls can still be read.

The programme falls into three zones. At the top, in the lunette, the Annunciation is split between two fields: the kneeling archangel Gabriel at left and the Virgin at right. Between them is the opening of a real window, now shown as a blank white panel. Below is a second register, almost entirely lost, which held a Flagellation and an enthroned figure. The side walls carry two half-length saints in rectangular frames: a mitred bishop at left and a hooded monk at right. The curve of the arch carries ornamental painting with half-length saints set in quatrefoils.

The window at the centre of the Annunciation is the key to the composition. Painters of the period often divided an Annunciation across an opening, placing the angel and the Virgin on either side of an arch, window or altar. Here the opening is real. Light coming through it would have crossed the space between the messenger and the Virgin and passed, literally, through the moment of the Incarnation. Above the window, a narrow red frieze with pale floral ornament completes the upper frame.

The lower register is the most damaged part of the niche. Large areas are covered with a neutral fill, and only islands of paint survive. At the centre, a pale figure with bare, crossed legs stands next to a figure in red bending forward, a posture suited to the act of striking. Smaller fragments survive at left. At upper right, a haloed head is the last trace of the enthroned figure. The museum describes a Flagellation of Christ with the Madonna enthroned beside it, and calls the theme iconographically rare. The fragments no longer allow the scene to be reconstructed in detail.

The saints on the side walls give the programme its local meaning. According to the museum, the mitred bishop is Saint Blaise, patron of the abbey, and the monk is Saint Benedict, father of the rule the community followed. They are set lower than the Annunciation, close to the eye level of anyone standing in the niche. Their powerful, individual heads make them the most immediate presences in the ensemble. Together they bring the universal mystery painted above down to this particular monastery.

The arch intrados ties the three zones together. Its surface is a lattice of red and green lozenges, with a golden quatrefoil at the apex. At either side, where the arch curves down, quatrefoils hold half-length saints on a dark ground. According to the catalogue the saints are Peter and Paul, the founders of the Roman Church. In the part below the springing of the arch, the painter set trompe-l’oeil corbels. These grey, curved consoles appear to project from the wall and to carry the arch itself, a deliberately illusionistic device.

The contrast the museum draws between the heavy angel and the fragile Virgin can be seen across the whole niche. The painter uses different registers of form for different kinds of meaning. Messengers and saints are solid and physically present. The Virgin, receiving the Incarnation, is withdrawn and enclosed. The illusionistic architecture of corbels, frames and pavilion gives each figure a place in a coherent space. This way of thinking belongs to the Giottesque culture of Assisi, adapted to the modest scale of a monastic chapel.

The niche is also a document of the programme that surrounded the 1345 Crucifixion. The catalogue dates it by that association, not by any inscription of its own. The two works came from the same church and were acquired together by the State in 1966. Both are now on deposit at the Pinacoteca in Fabriano. The Crucifixion is public and monumental. The niche is more intimate, made of devotional images at close range. Taken together they show a painter able to work convincingly at both scales.

The Archangel Gabriel: Weight, Colour and the Word

Gabriel kneels in the left field of the lunette, in strict profile, turned towards the Virgin across the window. The field is a tall rectangle cut into the curve of the arch, with an orange border that steps around the painted corbel at lower left. Above it, a triangular spandrel on an ochre ground is filled with a large, stylised leafy ornament. The angel occupies almost the whole lower part of the field, and his mass seems to press against the frame.

His pose is simple and monumental. He kneels on one knee, and the rose-red robe spreads over the ground in a broad, bell-shaped mass that anchors the figure like a base. A wide turquoise sash crosses his waist, and the same colour runs along the hem and the edges of the sleeves. Few lines break the robe. Its volume comes from graded light and shade, not from linear detail, and this gives the figure the solid, compact weight that the museum rightly emphasises.

The wings rise behind him, open and upright, in pale pink feathers that deepen to red at the tips. The painter has laid out the feathers in orderly rows, carefully but without fussiness. The wings frame the head and shoulders and fill the upper part of the field on both sides, making the angel’s arrival visible without any sense of flight. This Gabriel has already landed, knelt and begun to speak.

The hands carry the message. The right hand is raised, with the fingers forming the gesture of speech used in medieval painting for spoken words. The left hand, lower, opens towards the Virgin. The two hands stand out clearly against the dark ground, so that at a distance they read as signs. The whole scene depends on this gesture: in the absence of a written text, the hands deliver the salutation.

The head is carefully modelled. The face has a strong jaw, a straight nose, a small closed mouth and a steady gaze fixed on the Virgin. The hair is a mass of reddish-blond curls bound by a band. The gold halo is worked with fine radiating lines. The face is not delicate or ethereal. It has the firm, healthy substance of the painter’s other figures, and this is what makes the angel’s presence so tangible.

Colour holds the image together. The rose of the robe, the pink of the wings and the turquoise of the sash stand out against a dark, grey-green background and an ochre floor. The same colours recur in the intrados and in other parts of the niche. The chromatic unity binds the angel to the decoration as a whole. It also balances him against the Virgin opposite, whose red sleeves echo his robe.

The surface is well preserved compared with the lower register. There are small losses along the edge of the wings and in the drapery, and some abrasion. The light, even modelling of the face and hands still reads clearly, as does the orderly treatment of the feathers. The condition of this field allows a closer look at the painter’s technique than almost anywhere else in his catalogue.

The figure belongs to the Giottesque tradition of solid, weighty angels, as seen at Assisi. Its broad, simplified volume and its clear placement in space look back to that model. The painter has turned it into something robust and slightly rustic. This Gabriel is less courtly and graceful than a Sienese angel, but he has a gravity of his own. The museum’s contrast between the angel’s physical weight and the fragility of the Virgin begins here.

The Virgin Annunciate: Humility in a Fragile Pavilion

The Virgin kneels in the right field of the lunette, facing Gabriel across the window. She is in near profile, turned to the left. Her arms are crossed over her breast and her head is bowed, and she seems to look down rather than at the angel. This is the moment of acceptance, the fiat. The gesture of crossed arms expresses humility and consent together, and the painter has given it a quiet, withdrawn intensity.

She is enclosed in a slender architectural pavilion. Thin white posts support a flat, projecting roof, and the whole structure stands on a low polygonal platform seen in foreshortening. Behind her, a back wall holds an arched doorway with an orange-red door. At right, a narrow side wall opens with a small slit window. Beyond the pavilion lies a dark blue-grey background, and at the bottom an ochre floor. The museum’s phrase is exact: she seems to close herself in within the fragile structures that shelter her.

This architecture reflects the Giottesque interest in building a believable space for the figure. It is not a solid room. It is an open, schematic frame, a house reduced to its essential lines. The thin posts barely mark the boundaries of the space, and their fragility contrasts with the bulk of the angel opposite. The Virgin’s world is enclosed, protected and slightly unreal, a space prepared for the Incarnation.

Her dress combines a red gown, visible at the sleeves and bodice, with a pale mantle of white and grey that falls in broad folds to the platform and spreads at the base. A narrow line of turquoise edges the neckline, echoing the angel’s sash. The mantle is painted in cool, silvery tones, which set her apart from the warm rose of the angel. The colour contrast underlines the difference between the heavenly messenger and the receiving Virgin.

The head is small and delicate in relation to the body. The face is pale, with lowered eyes, a long nose and a small mouth. The reddish-blond hair is gathered in a band, and the gold halo is finely worked. The expression is grave and inward. As elsewhere in this painter’s work, it is individual without being sentimental: a young woman absorbed in thought, not an idealised type.

The proportions deserve attention. The Virgin’s body is long and slender, with narrow shoulders, and the kneeling figure is almost as tall as the pavilion. This is not a mistake of scale. It is a way of making her fill her space and seem both confined and important. The effect answers the angel’s breadth: he spreads outward, and she draws inward and upward.

At the top right of the field, the intrados of the arch shows a quatrefoil with a half-length saint in an ochre-yellow robe on a dark ground. The catalogue identifies the saints of the intrados as Peter and Paul. Since the other quatrefoil shows Paul, this one is presumably Peter, but no attribute can be made out clearly in the photograph. To the right, a painted corbel and a strip of orange marbling complete the frame.

The panel is well preserved, with only small losses and some thinning in the mantle and the background. It shows the painter’s more lyrical side, which is rarely visible in the dramatic Crucifixion. Here restraint replaces tension: the stillness of the pose, the silver tones of the mantle and the fragile pavilion speak of a painter who knew the lessons of Siena as well as those of Assisi.

Saint Paul in the Arch: A Portrait of Apostolic Severity

The apostle appears in a quatrefoil frame, one of the ornamental fields on the curve of the arch. A white moulded border outlines four lobes around a diamond, against a dark blue-grey ground. Around it, triangles of red and green form a lozenge lattice. The red fields are painted with loose, rapid strokes that imitate veined stone. The pattern of lozenges and quatrefoils is typical of Trecento architectural decoration, and the painter handles it with skill.

The saint is shown half-length and turned to the left, in near profile. He is bald, with a fringe of brown hair and a full dark beard, and his brow is deeply furrowed. The eyes are narrowed and the gaze is sharp. His features correspond to the traditional type of Paul, established in early Christian art and followed throughout the Middle Ages: the high bald forehead, the dark pointed beard, the look of the intellectual and teacher.

His right hand holds a white rounded object. It appears to be the pommel or hilt of a sword, Paul’s attribute from the instrument of his martyrdom. The blade is not clearly visible. The catalogue records Paul with the sword among the figures of the niche, and this reading fits the detail.

The mantle is salmon-red, broad and heavy, over a green tunic with an ochre lining at the shoulder. The folds are few and deep, and the figure has the same volumetric solidity as the angel below. Although the saint occupies a small, curved field, the painter has made him massive: the shoulders fill the quatrefoil, and the figure appears to lean out of the frame towards the viewer.

The face is one of the most striking in the niche. The painter has given it an almost psychological intensity: the frown, the set of the mouth, the concentrated eyes. The museum speaks of the series of portraits in the niche as among the most valuable of the Italian Trecento. The term “portrait” is a modern critical tribute, not a description of a likeness. The face does, however, have the specificity and force of a real individual.

The gold halo is worked with incised lines. It is slightly worn, but it still separates the head from the dark ground. The colours hold well: the red of the mantle, the green of the tunic and the gold of the halo stand out against the blue-black.

The surface shows fine cracks and small losses, especially around the hand, the halo and the lower part of the mantle. The white border of the quatrefoil is worn in places. The overall reading is intact, and the detail of the face in particular is well preserved.

In the programme, Paul faces Peter across the arch. Together the two founders of the Roman Church stand above the Annunciation, marking the ecclesiastical frame within which the mystery of the Incarnation is received. It is a traditional pairing, suited to a Benedictine abbey whose history was tied to papal authority. The confirmation of Abbot Pietro by the pope in 1337 is one example of that link.

Saint Blaise: The Patron of the Abbey

Saint Blaise, bishop of Sebaste and patron of the abbey, occupies the left side wall of the niche. He appears in a rectangular frame with a green border. At the top runs a narrow frieze of white circles on a reddish ground, a pearled motif typical of the period. The dark blue background brings forward the head and the mitre. The lower half of the panel is lost. The museum identifies the figure as Saint Blaise, and the mitre and vestments support the identification.

The saint is shown frontally, looking straight out. It is the most direct gaze in the niche. The eyes are wide open, with dark pupils and heavy lids, under raised, arched brows. Deep lines score the forehead, and the cheeks are marked. The long white beard falls in soft, parallel strands onto the chest. The effect is severe, almost hypnotic, as if the patron were watching everyone who entered.

The mitre is tall and white, decorated with bands of embroidery (orphreys) in a dotted pattern, with a jewelled band around its base. The halo behind it is gold, and its radiating lines are incised with care. The mitre sets the head in a strong geometric shape, and the halo frames both in a circle. Together they give the bishop an iconic, almost frontal-Byzantine solemnity.

The vestments are painted in red, with patches of gold and ochre at the collar and a light green amice. Much of the red has been worn down and flaked, especially at right, where the fabric falls to the edge of the frame. What remains still conveys the richness of the liturgical dress and its weight on the shoulders.

The large area of neutral fill below leaves only one small island of paint. On it, a thin vertical line punctuated with red marks can be seen, probably the shaft of the crozier. It is a reminder of how much of the figure has been lost, and of the bishop’s full-length or half-length presentation with his pastoral staff.

At the right edge, the photograph shows part of the neighbouring field with a strip of red drapery on an ochre ground. It may belong to the angel above or to another part of the niche. The exact relationship cannot be determined from the image alone.

The head of Blaise is perhaps the finest single passage in the niche. The painter builds the face with firm, broad planes of light and shade and does not overload it with detail, so that it reads from a distance. The intensity of the gaze and the individual features make it easy to see why the museum speaks of one of the most valuable series of portraits of the Italian Trecento.

In the programme, Blaise is the abbey’s patron and its name-saint. His place on the side wall, close to the viewer, makes him the intercessor between the monks and the images above. His frontal gaze and his authority as bishop and martyr give the niche an almost institutional character: this is the church of Saint Blaise, and he presides over it.

Saint Benedict: The Father of the Rule

Saint Benedict occupies the right side wall, facing Blaise across the niche. He is shown half-length in a rectangular frame with a green border, beneath a frieze of red foliate scrolls on an ochre ground. The background is a grey-blue that harmonises with his habit. The museum identifies him as Saint Benedict, founder of the rule followed by the monks of San Biagio.

He is turned three-quarters to the left, towards the centre of the niche and, presumably, towards Blaise and the Flagellation. His head is covered by the ample hood of the monastic habit, which frames the face in a heavy oval. The habit is painted in greys that shade to near-black in the folds. In art the Benedictines are traditionally shown in black, and the grey here may reflect the original colour, alterations of the pigment, or wear. The photograph does not allow a decision.

The face is gaunt and deeply lined. The forehead is furrowed, the nose long and sharp, the mouth pressed shut, and the eyes set under frowning brows. His sidelong look is stern and penetrating. It is not the face of a gentle founder but of a master of discipline. The museum’s praise of the portraits is fully justified here: the physiognomy is individual, marked by age and austerity.

In his right hand, raised across his chest, he holds a short ochre object that looks like a rod or stick. It is probably the virga, the rod of correction associated with Benedict as the disciplinarian of monastic life. The attribute is appropriate for a figure representing the rule to the community that lived by it.

The lower half of the panel is badly damaged. The paint has flaked away in large patches, exposing the preparatory layers in ochre and grey. Below that is an area of neutral fill. In the middle of the damaged zone, a small light rectangle with traces of green and red may be the edge of a book, another traditional attribute of Benedict as author of the rule. It is too fragmentary to be sure.

The right edge of the photograph shows part of a polychrome wooden sculpture displayed nearby in the museum. It is not part of the niche. It reminds us that the fresco is now seen in a museum setting, not in its original church.

Stylistically, Benedict is the counterpart of Blaise. Blaise is frontal and hieratic; Benedict is turned and more narrative, as if caught in thought or about to speak. Both share the broad, firm modelling and the intense faces that mark the painter’s hand, and together they frame the niche with two strong personalities.

In the programme, Benedict represents the monastic community that commissioned the niche and prayed before it. His presence, facing the patron bishop, shows the abbey’s two identities: its dedication to Blaise and its Benedictine rule. In 1345, under an abbot named Pietro, these two saints would have looked out at the monks from the walls of their own church.

Santa Maria Maddalena in Fabriano

In 1932 Rassegna marchigiana 10 (pp. 167–174) published “Un affresco del Maestro di San Biagio in Caprile”, in a series titled “Opere d’arte inedite e sconosciute”. The fresco was in the small church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Fabriano. The church’s early history is known mainly from local tradition, which I have not been able to check. It is said to have begun as a hospital on the road to Rome and later to have become the seat of the Pia Università dei Cartai, the paper-makers’ guild that still owns it. The national catalogue records the building as an “Oratorio di S. Maria Maddalena”. It attributes the frescoes to the Maestro di Campodonico and the altarpiece, the Penitent Magdalene, to Orazio Gentileschi.

The frescoes on the right wall are a Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John, an Annunciation, and a Saint John the Evangelist (not shown). The Zeri photo archive groups all three under the Master of Campodonico in a single card, citing Zeri’s 1963 article and the 1971 article in Commentari. According to the encyclopaedia, the frescoes were detached and then put back in their original positions. Santa Maria Maddalena is therefore the one place where a work by the master can be seen in the building it was made for.

Its iconography is unusual. The angel approaches from the right, reversing the common arrangement, and the encyclopaedia calls this “rara”. The reason is uncertain. It may reflect the shape of the wall, or the direction from which viewers approached the image. In style, the encyclopaedia sees here most clearly a “sottofondo riminese”, probably passed on through the Master of Sant’Emiliano. On that basis it treats the Annunciation as the master’s earliest known work. That is a judgement of style, not a documented chronology.

Passion and Incarnation

The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John

The Crucifixion occupies the left part of the wall. It is reduced to the essential core of the scene: Christ on the cross between the Virgin and Saint John. There are no soldiers, no crowd, no angels and no holy women. It is the devotional type of the Crucifixion, meant for meditation rather than narrative, very different from the crowded Calvary of San Biagio in Caprile. At left, a vertical border with black and white lozenges frames the scene. At right, a second patterned band separates it from the Annunciation.

The background is a dense blue-black, now mottled and speckled. Its irregular, cloudy look is probably the result of the loss of the upper paint layer, which exposed the darker preparation beneath. The effect is accidental but powerful: the figures seem to stand against a night sky or a stormy void. Christ’s body, the Virgin and John read against it as light, isolated shapes, much as the Crucifixion of 1345 stands against its monochrome sky.

Christ hangs with his arms stretched upward and outward, in a sharper V than the almost horizontal arms of the San Biagio Crucifixion. The upper left arm reaches the top edge of the painting. The head, with its long auburn hair and short beard, sinks towards his left shoulder and towards John. The eyes are closed and the face is drawn. Christ is dead, and the painter shows this with restraint, with none of the contortion of later Gothic Crucifixions.

The body has suffered serious losses. A large area of neutral fill covers the right side of the torso, the hip and the loincloth, and much of the thighs. The chest, the ribs, the upper abdomen and the lower legs survive. They show the same lean, carefully modelled anatomy as in the later work. The crossed feet are nailed with a single nail, and traces of red at the wound mark the blood flowing down the wood. At the foot of the cross, among the rocks, is the skull of Adam, a traditional sign that Christ’s death redeems the first sin.

The Virgin stands at left, wrapped in a dark purple-brown mantle drawn over her head. She is not fainting, as at San Biagio, but upright. She raises one hand to her breast and lowers the other towards the cross, in a gesture that points to her son while expressing her own pain. Her face is pale and marked by grief: the brows are knitted, the eyes look outward and the mouth is slightly open. The heavy, dark mantle, with an ochre lining visible at the edge, gives her figure a solemn, closed silhouette.

John stands at right in a salmon-red mantle over a green tunic, which shows at the shoulder and at the lower left edge. His hands are clasped together at his waist under the fold of the mantle, a traditional gesture of contained sorrow. His young, beardless face leans towards Christ, with half-closed eyes and a downturned mouth, framed by auburn curls and a gold halo. His bare feet rest on the pale rocky ground. The mantle falls in broad, deep folds that build the figure as a solid, almost columnar mass.

The two mourners balance each other in colour and in feeling. The Virgin’s dark purple is set against John’s warm red. Her outward, pleading gaze answers his inward, lowered one. Her gesture towards the cross is matched by his closed hands. The painter does not need a crowd to convey the drama. The three figures and the dark ground carry the whole emotional weight of the event, in a composition suited to the private devotion of a small hospital church.

According to the encyclopaedia, the frescoes of Santa Maria Maddalena were detached for restoration and then returned to their original position. They are the only works by the master that can still be seen in the building for which they were made. The heavy losses have a history of their own, but the surviving parts show the painter’s early manner. It already has the sense of volume and grave pathos that would culminate in the Crucifixion of 1345, here in a quieter and more concentrated form.

The Annunciation

The Annunciation occupies the right part of the wall, separated from the Crucifixion by a narrow vertical band decorated with lozenges and a small roundel. The encyclopaedia describes it as certainly by the master’s hand and singles out its rare iconography: the angel approaches from the right. In most Italian Annunciations Gabriel enters from the left, following the direction of reading. Here the scheme is reversed. The angel kneels at the right, and the Virgin stands at the left, in the loggia next to the Crucifixion.

The Virgin stands inside a Gothic structure, a loggia with slender grey columns and a round arch, behind which the ribs of a vault converge. The painter shows it in foreshortening. The side opens with a narrow second arch, and the base projects forward as a stepped platform, so that the building reads as a real volume, like a small chapel or portico. Behind the Virgin hangs a red cloth with a lozenge pattern and white floral motifs, a cloth of honour that marks her as the queen of heaven even in her humble home.

Unlike the kneeling Virgin of San Biagio, the Maddalena Virgin stands. She turns slightly towards the angel and lowers her head, with one hand raised, palm outward, and the other gathering the fold of her mantle. The gesture expresses the conturbatio, the troubled surprise with which Mary receives the angel’s greeting in Luke’s account, before her humble acceptance. It is a moment of hesitation, and the painter conveys it with delicacy.

Her dress is rich in colour. A golden-yellow mantle falls in long, flowing folds to the ground, with a dark red lining visible at the right. A dark, almost black sleeve appears at the left. A white veil covers her head and falls onto her shoulders. The face is oval, with lowered eyes, a long nose and a small mouth, framed by the gold halo. The elongated proportions and the fluid, curving folds give the figure an elegance that the encyclopaedia connects with a Riminese substratum, which it considers most visible here.

Gabriel kneels at the right, in profile, facing the Virgin. He wears a salmon-pink robe with a high waist, which spreads in broad folds over the ground. His right hand is raised in the gesture of speech and blessing, and the left is lowered, open. The face is striking: in profile, with a sharp nose, parted lips and a slightly smiling expression. The reddish-blond hair is gathered in a loop. The greenish tone of the flesh probably shows the green underpainting (verdaccio) beneath worn surface colour.

The wings are one of the most unusual passages. They are large and dark green, hanging downward on both sides of the body in long, ragged strands of feathers, like drooping foliage. Their colour and shape are very different from the pink, orderly wings of the San Biagio Gabriel. Part of this effect is probably due to alteration of the pigments or loss of the upper layers, but the arrangement suggests an angel who has just landed, with his wings still spread.

The space between the two figures is empty: a pale wall above a dark band of ground. The blue of the sky has probably been lost, as it often has in fresco. At the top right, a grey, layered cloud survives. It may have been the origin of the divine ray or the dove of the Holy Spirit, which are not visible now. The emptiness gives the scene a strong sense of interval: the angel’s word crosses a void to reach the Virgin, and the silence is part of the meaning.

The encyclopaedia considers this Annunciation the master’s earliest known work. The date 1336 is scratched into the fresco as a graffito and later transcribed below, and it is not visible in this photograph. The 1966 Urbino catalogue judged it unreliable, and a graffito records a visitor, not the painter, so the label “1330s” rests on style. Even at this early stage, the painter shows a clear command of space and a careful balance between the angel’s physical presence and the Virgin’s withdrawn grace. The same contrast returns, in a different form, in the Annunciation of San Biagio.

Santa Maria d’Appennino

The Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria d’Appennino, near Cancelli in the Fabriano territory, was a larger and more powerful house than San Biagio. Two frescoes from it have been connected with the master, with different results.

The first shows Saints John the Baptist and Catherine. According to the encyclopaedia, Pietro Toesca’s survey Il Trecento (1951, pp. 674–676) gave it to the master “con sicurezza”, and it has stayed in the catalogue. Local historiography gives other locations. In 2014 the fresco, restored for the exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile, was lent from a private collection at Porano (Terni); the encyclopaedia had recorded it in 1997 in the Palazzo Serafini at Fabriano.

The encyclopaedia dates it to a phase “di poco posteriore” (shortly after) the Crucifixion. In its “forme sintetiche sottolineate da campiture vive di colore” it sees the painter catching up with Florentine and Sienese painting of the 1340s, “da Maso di Banco alla tarda attività di Pietro e Ambrogio Lorenzetti”. In other words, the master kept watching the major centres after he painted the Crucifixion.

The second fresco, an Enthroned Virgin and Child with donors from the same abbey, has fared worse. It was attributed to the master “più dubitativamente”, and both Zeri (1963) and the Guida artistica di Fabriano (second edition, 1968) rejected it. The Zeri archive classes it as “Maestro di Campodonico (ambito)”, that is, by his circle. It should be presented as a work of his following.

The same caution applies at the edges of the catalogue. The encyclopaedia calls attempts to add more local frescoes “vani tentativi” (vain attempts). An article in Notizie da Palazzo Albani 17 (1988) doubted a Madonna and Child at San Pellegrino near Gualdo Tadino. The same article concluded that the master was a “personaggio unico” with a “parlata del tutto autonoma ed originale”. The accepted catalogue is small, and scholars have been right to keep it so.

The Valletta panel

The only panel painting ever given to the master was found not in the Marche but in Malta. It came from the Messina collection in Valletta, and Federico Zeri published it in 1963 (Bollettino d’Arte XLVIII, 4, 1963, pp. 325–331). The Zeri photo archive records its subject as “Giudizio Universale, Flagellazione di Cristo, Santi”: a Flagellation with saints, beneath a Last Judgement. The archive also keeps photographs supplied by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Malta, taken before and after restoration, among them details of the holy women and of Christ at the column.

For Zeri the attribution was more than a matter of connoisseurship. As a later survey of his writings on the Marche puts it (La pittura italiana nella Fototeca Zeri, 2011), he traced the painter’s origins “in chiave puramente riminese” and ranked him among the “cinque o sei autentici geni” of the generation between 1320 and 1350. The Valletta panel was one of the main supports of that reading.

Not everyone was persuaded. The encyclopaedia records the doubts raised in La pittura riminese del Trecento (1965, p. 59, no. 54) and in “Nuove osservazioni sul Maestro di Campodonico” (Commentari 22, 1971, pp. 326–333), and adds its own: the panel “non sembra trovare plausibile collocazione” in the master’s development, so that he “resta noto soltanto attraverso la sua attività di frescante”. Fabio Marcelli, by contrast, accepted the attribution in 1996 and built on it.

One further item remains open. The Zeri archive also cites a 2001 essay, “Il Maestro della Madonna di Tellaro tra il giottismo riformato lombardo e gli inizi di Barnaba da Modena”, in Restauri nel Golfo dei Poeti. I have not been able to consult it, and so cannot say whether it proposes a different attribution for the panel.

The Valletta Panel: Last Judgement, Flagellation and Saints

The panel has an unusual shape: a broad rectangle crowned by a low gable. It is enclosed in a gilded frame with carved leafy crockets that curl outward at the corners of the gable and along its sides. The field is divided into two zones. The triangular top holds a heavenly scene of judgement. The rectangular lower part holds the Flagellation, flanked by two groups of figures. Nothing is known of the panel’s original setting before it entered the Messina collection in Malta. Its format and size suggest a small altarpiece or devotional image, but that remains an assumption.

In the gable, Christ is enthroned frontally as judge. He wears a deep blue mantle that falls over his knees in heavy folds, and he sits above a white, rectilinear base that looks like the platform or step of the throne. His face, framed by dark hair and a beard, has darkened. Around him, arranged in tiers that follow the slope of the gable, sit haloed figures in red, green and blue, most likely the apostles as assessors of the Last Judgement. Small heads behind the throne may be angels. The composition cleverly fits the heavenly court into the triangle. The largest figure sits at the apex, and the others decrease towards the lower corners in a hierarchy of size and rank.

At the lower corners of the gable, two figures kneel with particular prominence: one in green at left, one in red and dark tones at right. Their position recalls the intercessors of the Last Judgement, usually the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist, who plead for humanity on either side of the judge. The worn surface does not allow a certain identification. Beneath the heavenly court runs a dark strip of ground. At left it is crowded with small, scratchy figures that may be the dead rising or the damned. At right a small round object, perhaps a basin or a tomb, stands against the dark. These tiny passages are the only direct evocation of the judgement of mankind. They are compressed into a narrow band between heaven and the scene of the Passion.

The lower zone is organised around an architectural box: a room seen from the front, with its front wall removed. An arched opening, supported by piers, frames an interior with a groin vault, side walls that recede in perspective and a floor of pale stone. To the left, a sloping roof extends over the holy women, and the building continues in a wall on the right. Some small rectangular shapes appear on the interior walls; their meaning is unclear. This construction is characteristic of Giottesque painting: the architecture is a stage that defines the space of the action and gives the figures a measurable place in it.

At the centre of the room, Christ stands bound to a column, whose capital is visible behind his halo. He wears only a loincloth, and his thin, pale body is modelled in soft light. His head is bowed, and his stance is still and passive. At left, a bald, bearded tormentor in a red coat grips the column or the rope while raising a stick. At right, a second tormentor, seen from behind in a tunic, raises his arm high to strike. The two executioners frame Christ in symmetrical but contrasting poses, one frontal and one from behind. The strong diagonals of their raised arms create the violence of the scene around the stillness of the victim.

On the left, outside the room and under the sloping roof, a group of holy women waits, in keeping with the Maltese museum’s description of “Holy Women Awaiting”. The Virgin, wrapped in an intense blue mantle, stands at the front of a close group of mourners in blue and dark robes. Before them a figure in red kneels with her head bent, perhaps the Magdalene. Another haloed head is visible behind. The group is compact, its heavy mantles pressed together into a single mass, and it looks towards the scene of torture it cannot enter. The idea of grieving witnesses shut out from the place of the Passion gives the panel a narrative subtlety that goes beyond the simple juxtaposition of subjects.

On the right, three standing saints form a second group, in quiet contrast to the women. The Maltese documentation identifies them as Saints Nicholas of Bari, Stephen and Damian:

• a bishop in mitre and patterned vestments with a crozier, presumably Nicholas;
• a young deacon in a dark blue dalmatic trimmed with gold, presumably Stephen;
• a figure in a long red robe and cap, the usual dress of the physician saints, presumably Damian.

These are not narrative figures but saints presented to the viewer. They were probably chosen for reasons of dedication or patronage that are now unknown. Their upright, columnar figures and rich costumes mirror the holy women across the panel, framing the Flagellation on both sides.

The surface is worn, with craquelure, darkened areas, and losses along the edges and the lower frame. The colours remain strong: lapis blue, vermilion and gold. As for the attribution, there are real points of contact with the frescoes of San Biagio. There is the Flagellation itself, a theme the Fabriano museum calls iconographically rare, which also appears in the lower register of the San Biagio niche. There are the solid, compact figures and the architectural box. On the other hand, the small scale, the refined detail and the narrative crowding differ in kind from the monumental murals. The master’s other works give no secure basis for comparison on panel. The panel remains an important document in the debate, but it has not become part of the master’s accepted catalogue.

The name Bartoluccio and other hypotheses

The most substantial attempt to give the master a name is Fabio Marcelli’s. In 1996 he published “Un possibile nome per il Maestro di Campodonico: Bartoluccio da Fabriano” in Commentari d’arte; the encyclopaedia cites it as issue 2, pp. 21–28, whereas Marcelli’s own list of publications gives issue 3, a discrepancy that can only be resolved by consulting the journal itself. Local bibliographies show that the proposal had been rehearsed a year earlier in the Fabriano weekly L’Azione, in a series of pieces titled “Il pittore degli ospedali”, “Il maestro era Bartoluccio?” and “La tavola di Malta”. Marcelli returned to the subject in 1998 as editor of Il Maestro di Campodonico. Rapporti artistici fra Umbria e Marche nel Trecento, published by the Cassa di Risparmio di Fabriano e Cupramontana, to which he contributed “Il Maestro di Campodonico tra Assisi e Fabriano” and “Botteghe di pittori a Fabriano nel Medioevo”. I have not been able to consult that volume.

The documentary basis of the hypothesis is harder to establish, and here it is necessary to be explicit about the limits of what I have been able to verify. The encyclopaedia summarises the proposal in a single sentence: “Marcelli (1996), accettando invece l’attribuzione della tavola della Valletta, suggerisce di identificare il pittore con Bartoluccio da Fabriano.” The formulation makes clear that the name is bound up with the acceptance of the Valletta panel, but it says nothing of the documents on which the identification rests.

Non-scholarly sources supply only fragments. A general-reference article states that the proposed Bartoluccio directed the confraternity of Santa Maria del Mercato, while a lecture text published online identifies him as a miniaturist recorded in a contemporary choir book, and connects this with the calligraphic refinement of the Caprile inscription. Neither claim could be checked against Marcelli’s own texts or against the archives. The obvious place to begin such a check would be the early publication of archival material cited in the encyclopaedia’s bibliography, “Documenti di pittori fabrianesi”, in Rassegna marchigiana 2 (1923–24, pp. 473–478); whether it records a painter named Bartoluccio, and at what date, I have not been able to determine.

Chronology presents a further difficulty. At least one local-history account places a “Bartoluccio” among the painters around Allegretto Nuzi in the second half of the century. If the documented Bartoluccio belongs to that later generation, his identification with a painter already active in the 1330s would imply an unusually long career. That is not impossible, but it would need to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

The reception of the proposal has accordingly been cautious. The encyclopaedia reports it without endorsement, and at the same time rejects the Valletta panel on which it partly depends. The Pinacoteca continues to treat the painter as anonymous. The catalogue of the 2014 exhibition, according to its publisher, pursued the question of identity “lungo traiettorie e suggestioni inedite”, though I have not been able to establish whether it accepts or sets aside the name of Bartoluccio. Nor is Marcelli’s the only suggestion: an article in the local press in 1995, titled “Il maestro di Campodonico era un monaco”, proposed that the painter was himself a monk, a view that likewise lacks any published documentary support.

“Bartoluccio da Fabriano” thus remains a reasoned hypothesis, advanced in a scholarly journal and deserving of serious discussion. As yet, however, no document connects a named individual with any of the attributed works, and to write of “the Master of Campodonico, i.e. Bartoluccio da Fabriano”, as though the question were settled, is to mistake a proposal for a fact.

Style and formation

The encyclopaedia is candid about the difficulty of the question. As with every artist of stature who transforms an inherited language into something original, it observes, “è difficile nel caso del M. di Campodonico trovare riferimenti precisi”. The account that follows therefore combines the judgements of the critical literature with what the paintings themselves reveal; it does not pretend to reconstruct a documented training.

All accounts agree that the master’s language has Riminese roots, though they differ in the weight they give them. Zeri proposed an origin “in chiave puramente riminese”, whereas the encyclopaedia, more cautiously, detects a Riminese substratum “probabilmente mediato dal Maestro di S. Emiliano”, most clearly legible in the Annunciation of Santa Maria Maddalena. The hypothesis is historically plausible. Riminese Giottism, with its narrative clarity and luminous colour, had spread through the Marche in the 1310s and 1320s, as the Cappellone of San Nicola at Tolentino attests, and a painter formed in Fabriano around 1330 would naturally have taken that vocabulary as his point of departure.

The decisive transformation, however, came from Assisi, a journey of a few days across the Apennine. The encyclopaedia speaks of a “meditazione della lezione spaziosa e plastica del Giotto assisiate e della sua bottega”, and the ICCD record arrives independently at a similar conclusion, noting that the artist “risente del clima culturale assisiate della Basilica Inferiore ed in particolare di Giotto e di Pietro Lorenzetti”. The encyclopaedia also proposes a specific point of comparison in Puccio Capanna’s Crucifixion from the oratory of San Rufinuccio, now in the Museo Capitolare of San Rufino at Assisi. Puccio was among the most refined interpreters of Giotto’s late manner, and the soft modelling and grave pathos of his painting are close in feeling to the Campodonico Crucifixion.

To Pietro Lorenzetti’s frescoes in San Francesco the master owed, in the encyclopaedia’s phrase, his “sapienza illustrativa”: the capacity to populate a Crucifixion with riders and soldiers without dispersing its central drama, and to give grief a violent, physical form. Yet the debt is far from slavish. The master’s figures remain heavier and more compact than Pietro’s, and his faces more rustic, a difference that the Pinacoteca aptly captures in the phrase “realismo popolaresco”.

The master’s development did not end there. In the encyclopaedia’s reading, the fresco from Santa Maria d’Appennino shows him renewing his language once more in the 1340s, in the light of Maso di Banco’s broad forms and of the late work of the Lorenzetti. A telling confirmation comes from the Treccani entry on Allegretto Nuzi, which maintains that Nuzi already knew the art of Ambrogio Lorenzetti “anche se per via indiretta, grazie alla produzione del Maestro di Campodonico nella stessa Fabriano”. By the middle of the century, it seems, the master’s own paintings had become a vehicle through which Sienese ideas reached Fabriano.

From these several strands a distinctive artistic personality emerges. Its hallmarks are a monumentality founded on large, compact figures modelled in strong light and shade; an emotional directness expressed in gestures of collapse, clinging and supplication that remain legible from a distance; individual and often rustic faces, set in a landscape whose angular forms echo those of the figures; and, in contrast to this robustness, a refinement of detail that is most evident in the lettering of the inscription. None of these qualities is unique in itself. It is their combination, and the level at which they are realised, that led the encyclopaedia to conclude that the master “non ha paralleli nella pittura marchigiana del momento”. A striking measure of that distinctiveness is offered by Bernard Berenson’s Italian Pictures of the Renaissance (Oxford 1932), which assigned the Campodonico frescoes to the Abruzzese Andrea Delitio, a painter of the fifteenth century. The error is revealing: the sculptural force of the Crucifixion could be mistaken for the work of a much later age.

The master, the “Fabriano school” and Allegretto Nuzi

The question of the master’s legacy receives an unexpected answer in the encyclopaedia, which holds that his work as a fresco painter “non ebbe eco immediata nelle Marche”. It admits only two exceptions: the right-hand chapel of San Francesco at Tolentino and the oratory of Santa Maria della Stella at Monte Martello, near Cagli.

The Monte Martello paintings have given their name to another anonymous artist, the Master of Monte Martello. Local scholarship on Cagli situates him within a triangle formed by Cagli, Gubbio and Fabriano, alongside the Gubbio painters Mello and Guido Palmerucci and the Master of Campodonico himself, and observes that the Monte Martello angels, with their sheath-like robes and wide necklines, resemble those of the Caprile Crucifixion. The comparison is suggestive, but since it derives from local studies it deserves to be tested against the paintings themselves.

If the master’s immediate following was slight, his reputation appears to have grown with time. The encyclopaedia records a renewed attention to his work “in una temperie già tardogotica”, citing an anonymous painter who quoted passages from the Crucifixion in a small panel of the same subject now in the Pinacoteca at Fabriano. It also discerns his influence in the early works of the painter once known as “Carlo da Camerino”, now identified as Olivuccio di Ceccarello, among them an Annunciation in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. That a fresco of 1345 was still being quoted around 1400 is eloquent testimony to the standing it had acquired.

The claim most frequently repeated about the master’s legacy concerns Allegretto Nuzi, whom several popular works of reference describe as his pupil, or as “probably trained” by him. The documented facts are considerably more modest. According to the encyclopaedia, Nuzi was enrolled in the Florentine painters’ Compagnia di San Luca in 1346 as “Allegrettus Nuccii de Senis”, a designation that the entry takes as evidence of a Sienese training. The same entry dates his return to Fabriano to about 1348, attributing it to the plague, whereas accounts connected with the exhibition Oro e colore nel cuore dell’Appennino. Allegretto Nuzi e il ‘300 a Fabriano (2021–22) give 1347. On either reckoning, Nuzi’s documented career in Fabriano began at almost exactly the moment when the master’s documented activity came to an end.

A connection between the two painters is therefore plausible, but it cannot be described as an apprenticeship. No document places Nuzi in the master’s workshop, and the epithet “de Senis” points in another direction altogether. Commentary on the 2021 exhibition emphasises, moreover, that Nuzi’s mature style drew on Siena and on Florentine followers of Giotto such as Maso di Banco and Bernardo Daddi, and that it moved away from the “rudi e forti” faces of the Campodonico tradition. Nuzi may well have known the master’s work and responded to it; to call him the master’s pupil, however, goes beyond the evidence.

The same caution should govern the use of the phrase “Fabriano school”. The category is a useful one, and the 2014 exhibition was constructed around it. Yet the encyclopaedia’s judgement that the master found little immediate following ought to discourage the notion of a workshop tradition passed directly from him to Nuzi and thence to Gentile. What the documents reveal is rather a regional culture composed of several strands, within which the master stands out as an exceptional and somewhat isolated figure.

Conclusion

The Master of Campodonico remains, after more than a century of study, a painter known only through his works. His name records a place rather than a person, and everything that can be said about him must be built outward from a handful of frescoes, a single inscription and a modest body of critical literature. That literature, as this essay has tried to show, contains a surprising number of errors repeated until they have come to resemble facts. A responsible account must therefore distinguish carefully between what is documented, what commands broad scholarly agreement, what rests on critical judgement, and what remains hypothesis.

The documented core is small but secure. In 1345, in the time of an abbot Pietro, very probably Pietro di Bartoluccio, a painter of exceptional ability executed a monumental Crucifixion on the end wall of the abbey church of San Biagio in Caprile. In the same church he painted a niche with an Annunciation, a Flagellation and the saints of the community, among them Blaise, the abbey’s patron, and Benedict, the father of its rule. The inscription commemorates the abbot, not the painter, and the niche is dated only by its association with the Crucifixion. Detached from their walls and acquired by the State in 1966, these frescoes belong to the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, but since 2014 they have been shown on renewable deposit at the Pinacoteca Civica in Fabriano, in the territory to which they have always belonged.

Around this core, scholars have agreed on a small number of further works. The Annunciation in Santa Maria Maddalena, which the encyclopaedia judges “sicuramente di mano del maestro”, is generally placed earlier, in a more markedly Riminese idiom; the date of 1336 sometimes attached to it rests on a graffito that has been judged unreliable since 1966. The fresco of Saints John the Baptist and Catherine from Santa Maria d’Appennino is placed somewhat later, in a phase that shows the painter responding to newer developments in Florence and Siena. Beyond these, attempts to enlarge the catalogue have met with justified scepticism, and the corpus has rightly been kept small.

The painter’s formation can be reconstructed only through critical judgement, but on its broad outlines the sources concur. His art appears to have grown from a Riminese substratum, perhaps transmitted through the Master of Sant’Emiliano, and to have been transformed by a direct encounter with Assisi: with the spacious, plastic language of Giotto and his workshop, with the grave pathos of Puccio Capanna, and with the narrative intelligence of Pietro Lorenzetti. In the 1340s he seems to have renewed his language once more in the light of Maso di Banco and the late Lorenzetti, to the point that his own paintings may have served as a channel through which Sienese ideas reached the young Allegretto Nuzi.

At the margins of this picture lie two hypotheses that deserve serious discussion but cannot yet be treated as established. The Valletta panel, attributed by Zeri in 1963 and accepted by Marcelli, has been doubted by other specialists and judged by the encyclopaedia to have no plausible place in the master’s development. The name Bartoluccio da Fabriano, proposed by Marcelli in 1996, is a reasoned conjecture, but no published document yet connects a named individual with any of the attributed works. To present either as certain is to mistake a proposal for a fact.

The master’s legacy is equally in need of careful statement. His frescoes, the encyclopaedia maintains, found little immediate echo in the Marche, and the familiar image of a workshop tradition passing directly from him to Nuzi and thence to Gentile da Fabriano finds no support in the documents. The claim that Nuzi was his pupil, repeated in popular works of reference, is unsupported. Yet the Caprile Crucifixion was still being quoted by painters around 1400, and its reputation seems to have grown rather than diminished in the late Gothic period. The master emerges less as the founder of a school than as an exceptional and somewhat isolated figure within a regional culture of several strands.

None of these qualifications diminishes the achievement of the paintings themselves. The Caprile Crucifixion brought to a remote Benedictine valley one of the most powerful Giottesque images of the Passion produced outside the great artistic centres. Its compact, weighty bodies, its violent grief and its broken, rocky world are held together by a formal intelligence of a very high order, and the niche shows the same painter capable of restraint, lyricism and penetrating characterisation at close range. Zeri’s inclusion of the master among the “cinque o sei autentici geni” of his generation may be generous, but it is not absurd. The encyclopaedia’s more measured verdict, that his was a personality “di grande rilievo culturale e tenuta formale, che non ha paralleli nella pittura marchigiana del momento”, provides the soundest foundation for further study.

What is lacking is a documented person. The fire of 1443 that destroyed the abbey’s archive has probably taken with it the most obvious source of information, and any further progress will have to come from the notarial and communal archives of Fabriano, from the published documents of Fabriano painters, and from technical examination of the paintings themselves. Until such evidence comes to light, the master’s name should remain a place-name, and those who write about him should keep clearly separate what is known from what is merely hoped.