Maestro di Sant'Emiliano

Introduction: A Name Without a Painter

The Maestro di Sant’Emiliano is the conventional name for the painter who stands at the head of the Giottesque school of Fabriano: a Marchigian master of Riminese and Assisi-derived formation, active in the first decades of the fourteenth century. The name comes from a single monumental fresco, detached from the Benedictine abbey of Sant’Emiliano in Congiuntoli on the Umbria–Marche border and now in Fabriano’s civic gallery. This is the only secure fact from which everything else follows. It needs stating plainly because the name has repeatedly led readers astray, both about the saint it refers to (see the next section) and about the painter’s origins, and because the corpus credited to him in popular and even institutional summaries is larger than the critical literature can support.

Like every notname, “Maestro di Sant’Emiliano” is a working hypothesis, not a biography. No document names him, no signature survives, and no contract links his hand to any surviving surface. What survives is a group of paintings that connoisseurs have judged to share a manner, and a critical tradition in which that judgement has been made, revised and argued over. This essay follows the tradition closely and keeps four levels of certainty apart throughout: what is documented, what is securely attributed, what is debated, and what is merely conjectural. Its principal sources are the records of the Pinacoteca Civica “Bruno Molajoli”, the photographic and catalogue archive of the Fondazione Federico Zeri, the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, the bibliographic record of the three scholars who have defined the problem — Bruno Molajoli, Federico Zeri and Giampiero Donnini — and the 2014 exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile. Pittura e scultura a Fabriano fra Due e Trecento. Where only local or popular sources exist, as they often do for the abbey of Congiuntoli, this is said openly.

At stake is more than one artist’s reputation. Fabriano’s Trecento painting — the school of Allegretto Nuzi and Francescuccio Ghissi, and in the longer view the ground from which Gentile da Fabriano emerged — needs a beginning. Criticism has placed that beginning in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, when painters working in and around the paper-making town absorbed the Assisi workshops and the new Riminese school and turned them into something recognisably local. The Maestro di Sant’Emiliano is the name given to that beginning. Understanding what the name covers, and what it does not, is therefore a precondition for any history of painting in the central Apennines.

Which Sant’Emiliano? Disambiguating the Notname and Debunking the Trevi Reading

The commonest mistake about the painter is geographical. Umbria has more than one cult of a saint named Emilian, and the best known is tied to Trevi and the Spoleto area, where Saint Emilian is venerated as the town’s bishop-martyr. A reader who meets the name “Maestro di Sant’Emiliano” without context, and who knows that Umbrian painting of the early Trecento has its own anonymous masters, may easily assume the painter belongs to the Valle Umbra and served that cult. The assumption is wrong and must be set aside at the outset.

The Emilian of the notname belongs to another cult and another landscape. The abbey of Sant’Emiliano in Congiuntoli, in the comune of Scheggia e Pascelupo (province of Perugia), was dedicated, according to its local historiography, to Emilian, one of the martyrs of Numidia. He is described as a fifty-year-old soldier of the imperial army put to death under Valerian (253–260), whose relics were supposedly brought to Gubbio in the sixth or seventh century by African bishops fleeing the Vandal persecutions. The same tradition links him to the more famous martyrs of the group, Marianus and James, to whom Gubbio’s cathedral is dedicated. These hagiographic details come from local compilations and the Italian encyclopaedic literature, not from a critical edition of the relevant passio, and they should be read as the tradition the abbey itself cultivated rather than as established history. For the purpose here they are decisive all the same. The abbey’s Emilian is a Gubbio saint, not a Trevi one. The abbey lay in the diocese of Gubbio, on the border with the diocese of Nocera Umbra. And the fresco that gave the painter his name went not to Spoleto or Foligno but to Fabriano, a few kilometres across the Apennine watershed in the Marche.

The notname must also be told apart from a group of similar-sounding anonymi who crowd the same bibliography. The Maestro di Sant’Agostino is a different, earlier painter: the author of the thirteenth-century frescoes from the Augustinian convent in Fabriano, now in the Pinacoteca, which the museum places in the second half of the century and which Blume and Hansen date before about 1280 and associate, as a hypothesis, with the refectory. The confusion comes easily, because the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano is himself credited with the fourteenth-century Gothic chapels in the church of Sant’Agostino. The two notnames therefore sit, misleadingly, on the same building. The Maestro di San Verecondo is a fifteenth-century painter active in Fabriano and Gualdo Tadino, part of the post-Gentile generation, and has nothing to do with the early Trecento. The Maestro di Sant’Elsino and the Sienese Maestro della Madonna di Palazzo Venezia are unrelated personalities whose names are sometimes confused with this one in careless indexes and search results. Finally, the longer form “Maestro della Maestà di Sant’Emiliano” is not a separate painter but an older, fuller version of the same notname. It survives, for example, as a heading in the University of Urbino’s digital heritage archive, and it is the form reportedly used in Molajoli’s early writings. Throughout this essay the two forms refer to one and the same artistic personality.

The Abbey of Sant’Emiliano in Congiuntoli and the Monastic Geography of the Apennines

The abbey that gave the painter his name stands where the Rio Freddo joins the Sentino, the confluence from which the toponym “Congiuntoli” is usually derived. It lies at the foot of Monte Aguzzo, along the valley road that runs from Scheggia over the Passo del Corno towards Sassoferrato, just upstream of the gorges through which the Sentino later cuts towards Frasassi. Today it lies inside the Umbrian comune of Scheggia e Pascelupo. In the Middle Ages, however, it belonged to a mountain world whose religious and economic ties ran as easily east, towards Sassoferrato and Fabriano, as west, towards Gubbio. Any explanation of how a fresco from an Umbrian abbey came to define a Marchigian school has to start from this geography.

The monastic archive has been lost, and the foundation cannot be dated precisely. The local historiography puts it in the tenth century, on the borders of the Duchy of Spoleto. It was a Benedictine house in a landscape thick with eremitic and reformed foundations. The hermitage of Fonte Avellana, on the slopes of Monte Catria, and the abbey of Santa Maria di Sitria were its near neighbours, and through them Congiuntoli belonged to the network of eleventh-century reform associated with Peter Damian (1007–1072). Peter Damian, prior of Fonte Avellana, records that Dominic Loricatus (d. 1060) asked leave to withdraw repeatedly, as a hermit, to a small hermitage not far from the Congiuntoli monastery. Local writers have proposed that this was the hermitage of San Girolamo di Pascelupo, at the foot of Monte Cucco. The mention matters because it shows that by the mid-eleventh century Congiuntoli was a recognised landmark in the ascetic topography of the Catria–Cucco massif, one node in a chain of houses that included Fonte Avellana, Sitria and the Camaldolese foundations associated with Saint Romuald, who died in Fabriano’s own territory.

A few scraps of documentation give the institution substance. An abbot Pietro sold a small parcel of land at Varano in July 1110 to the abbot of San Vittore alle Chiuse. Another abbot, Uguccione, was delegated on 19 May 1301 to settle a dispute between San Vittore and the church of Santa Maria di Colle. The abbey reportedly held property at Perticano, Casalvento, Leccia and San Felice, and the castles of Liceto and Montelago, received from the counts Atti of Sassoferrato in 1274. It paid sixty florins in papal taxation in 1359, and the same sum again in 1408, 1409, 1412, 1445 and 1448. These references reach us through local compilations that do not always give archival shelfmarks, and they should be cited as reported, not as independently checked. Still, the 1301 abbot is worth noting. He shows a functioning abbatial community with standing in regional affairs within a decade or two of the date the museum gives the great fresco, which fits with a commission for a monumental image behind the high altar.

Decline set in early in the fifteenth century. In 1414 only three monks remained. Soon afterwards the house was given in commendam, and the tradition names Cardinal Bessarion, in the mid-fifteenth century, among the commendatory abbots. The Cistercians who had followed the Benedictines reportedly left in 1596, unwilling to remain dependent on commendatory abbots. In the eighteenth century the abbey passed to the diocese of Nocera, and the church was served by the parish priest of Montelago di Sassoferrato, who in 1930 ceded his rights to the parish priest of Perticano. In 1781 the commendatory abbot was Cardinal Antonio Maria Doria Pamphilj, and the benefice yielded six hundred scudi. The buildings eventually became private property and a farmhouse.

The church is a two-nave Romanesque-Gothic building of squared white stone. Octagonal pillars carry Romanesque arches with plain capitals, Romanesque windows sit beside trefoiled Gothic ones, and the presbytery is raised on a platform and has no apse. A text by a former parish priest of Perticano, reproduced online, adds details that matter for the fate of the paintings. The collapse of the roof, “more than a century” before he wrote, left the church a heap of rubble and exposed its frescoes to the weather. Among those frescoes had been a gigantic Saint Christopher, of which only the head, part of the halo, the Child on his shoulders and the legs in the water had been visible a few years earlier. The better-preserved nave on the Gospel side continued in use until about 1870. Recent local accounts report the reopening of the abbey to visitors and the installation of a full-scale (1:1) copy of the Maestà in the church. Local writers have also claimed Templar symbols on a window keystone and a link between the valley road and a branch of the Via Flaminia. These claims belong to popular literature, are unsupported by any scholarly study known to me, and play no part in the argument here.

The Fate of the Fresco: Detachment, Miliani, and the “Roman Fragment”

The Maestà stood over or behind the high altar. It was detached in the first decade of the twentieth century to save it from the ruin into which the complex had already fallen. The best early witness is the account of the Perticano parish priest, which states that in 1907 “the precious fresco over the high altar”, through the agency of “S. E. l’On. Giov. Battista Miliani”, was “riportato sulla tela” and was preserved in the Pinacoteca of Fabriano. Giovanni Battista Miliani was the head of the Fabriano paper mills and a parliamentarian, which explains both the honorific and the fresco’s destination: the Marchigian town whose industrial elite paid for the rescue, not the Umbrian diocese in which the abbey lay. A present-day Umbrian cultural website gives the same date, 1907. It calls the patron “Gian Battista Emiliani, owner of the Cartiere di Fabriano”, an evident garbling of the name, and describes the rescued fresco as “the last surviving” one of the cycle.

The competing date of 1906 comes from the Italian Wikipedia entry on the abbey and the many websites that copy it, which state that the walls were adorned “until 1906” and speak of “the detachment of the frescoes of 1906”. A regional news report manages to give both dates in one article. This pass found no primary document — no Soprintendenza file, museum accession record or contemporary notice — that settles the question. Of the two witnesses, the parish priest’s account is older and more circumstantial, so 1907 is the better-supported date. It is best given as “1907 (some sources: 1906)” until an archival record is published. The museum’s own description, “affresco riportato su telaio”, records the present state: a fresco transferred to a support on a stretcher. The parish priest’s “riportato sulla tela” describes the same kind of transfer, in the terminology of its time.

The same Wikipedia-derived tradition adds an intriguing but unverified claim. “Until the beginning of the twentieth century”, it says, the bishops depicted at Congiuntoli were two. At the detachment “one remained in place, while the other was taken to the Roman museum of Piazza Venezia”. The same sources go on to speculate that the two bishops were the Numidian martyrs Secundinus and Agapius. This pass found no confirmation in the online general catalogue of Italian cultural heritage, in any record of the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, or in any scholarly publication. The claim is internally awkward, too: if one bishop was taken to Rome and one “remained”, the bishop in the Fabriano fresco has to be explained as a third figure or as the one left in situ, and the sources do not say which. The identification of the bishops as Secundinus and Agapius is openly conjectural in the sources themselves. Nor is it compatible with the museum’s identification of the bishop in the Fabriano fresco as Emilian — reasonable, given the dedication, but itself nowhere supported by a surviving inscription known to me.

A 2014 press account reportedly mentioned a loan to the Fabriano exhibition from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini. That report could not be checked in this pass. The Fondazione Zeri catalogue does, however, offer a plausible explanation that has nothing to do with Congiuntoli. It records a Birth of Saint John the Baptist attributed to the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino, now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini (inv. 1423), whose previous location is given as “Chiesa di S. Lucia, Fabriano” (the church later known as San Domenico). It is dated to the second quarter of the fourteenth century (1325–1350), and the attribution rests on “F. Zeri, 1950”. If a Barberini loan came to Fabriano in 2014, this Fabriano-provenance fresco by the Urbino master is the obvious candidate. That would make the “Roman fragment” associated with Congiuntoli a separate, still undocumented question. The reconciliation is an inference, not a finding, but it is more economical than assuming an unrecorded Congiuntoli fragment in a Roman state collection.

Critical Fortune I: Bruno Molajoli and the Invention of a Local Master

The critical history of the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano begins with Bruno Molajoli, the scholar whose name the civic gallery of Fabriano now bears. His bibliography on Fabriano’s art spans several decades. It includes an essay on “La scuola pittorica fabrianese” in the bulletin issued for the Gentile da Fabriano centenary of 1928, and an article on a fresco of the Maestro di San Biagio in Caprile — that is, the painter later known as the Maestro di Campodonico — in Rassegna Marchigiana, X, 1932. It also includes the Guida artistica di Fabriano, published in Fabriano in 1936 and reissued in Genoa in 1968 and in Fabriano in 1990.

The text cited by the specialist literature as “Molajoli 1934, pp. 319–320” can now be identified precisely. It is B. Molajoli, “Gli affreschi riminesi in Sant’Agostino di Fabriano”, Rivista d’Arte, XVI, 1934, pp. 319–320. Two independent bibliographies record the reference: the bibliography of the Augustinian iconography site that first transmitted it, and a Fabriano bibliographic list. It is a short note, only two pages, and its title is itself a critical position: Molajoli presented the Sant’Agostino frescoes as Riminese. This matters. From the outset the Sant’Agostino chapels were read through the lens of the Rimini school rather than of Florentine Giottism directly, and the distinctive character of Fabriano’s early Trecento has been framed in relation to Rimini ever since.

According to the Augustinian iconography site, the 1934 note assigned the frescoes of the right-hand Gothic chapel of Sant’Agostino to the “Maestro della Maestà di Sant’Emiliano”. Later editions of the Guida artistica reportedly extended the attribution to the left-hand chapel as well. This pass has not been able to consult either the 1934 article or the successive editions of the guide. The precise wording, and whether Molajoli coined the notname in 1934 or took it from earlier local usage, therefore remain unverified. What the record does establish is significant enough. By 1934 Molajoli was treating the Sant’Agostino chapels as Riminese in style; the long form of the notname, tied to the Congiuntoli Maestà, was in use in the critical tradition; and the link between the eponymous fresco and the Augustinian chapels — the basis of the whole later corpus — was established in the Fabriano literature of the 1930s.

The timing is telling. The fresco had arrived in Fabriano about a quarter of a century earlier, through Miliani’s patronage. The partitions that had isolated the Sant’Agostino chapels were demolished in 1933, when preparatory work for their recovery began; that work was completed only in 1951. Molajoli’s note of 1934 thus followed immediately on the physical rediscovery of the chapels. It is best understood as the first critical response to newly visible paintings, framed by a Fabriano scholar keen to give his town a school of its own.

Critical Fortune II: Federico Zeri and the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino

The second stage belongs to Federico Zeri. In 1950 he published “Un affresco del Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino” in Proporzioni, III, pp. 36–40. The article was later reprinted in his Giorno per giorno nella pittura (1992, pp. 27–30) and in the collection of his Marchigian writings, Diario marchigiano 1948–1988 (2000, pp. 35–40). The Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino is the anonymous painter named after the Coronation of the Virgin with two female martyrs in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. The general literature describes him as trained among the Riminese painters active at Jesi and Tolentino, with a personal language contaminated by Umbrian and Sienese influences. Zeri’s intervention was to recognise this master’s hand in Fabriano, and in doing so to challenge Molajoli’s local unity.

The Fondazione Zeri archive preserves the practical traces of that reattribution. In the photographic series on fourteenth-century Riminese painting (busta 108, folder 6, “Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino”), Zeri filed a Fototeca Nazionale image of the scene of Saint Augustine accompanying to heaven the soul of the monk Hugues de Fontenay under the Urbino master. The same database lists under that master a work entry of “Stories of the life of Christ, Stories of the life of Saint Augustine and of other saints”. The formulation suggests that Zeri’s filing covered a substantial part of the Sant’Agostino decoration, not a single scene. The same archive attributes to the Urbino master the Barberini Birth of Saint John the Baptist from Santa Lucia in Fabriano on the basis of “F. Zeri, 1950”. This shows that Zeri’s 1950 article, or the reconstruction it launched, included Fabriano works beyond Sant’Agostino. Which fresco the article’s title refers to could not be determined in this pass without the text.

The effect on the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano was to shrink him. If at least part of the Augustinian cycle belonged to the Urbino master, the Fabriano notname lost much of what Molajoli had given it, and the eponymous Maestà risked becoming an isolated work. The chronological implications count too. The Zeri catalogue gives the Urbino master a “notizie metà sec. XIV” profile and dates the Barberini fresco to 1325–1350. Accepting Zeri’s reading therefore tends to push the Sant’Agostino decoration, or the parts of it he claimed, towards the second quarter of the century and away from the precocious date later proposed. The problem Zeri left behind — one designer or several, local master or itinerant Riminese-trained outsider, early or late — has shaped every later discussion.

Critical Fortune III: Giampiero Donnini and the 2014 Exhibition

The third stage is associated with Giampiero Donnini, whose work on Fabriano painting spans more than two decades. His essay “Tra Romanico e Gotico” appeared in Gentile e i pittori di Fabriano, co-edited by Donnini with a senior historian of Marchigian painting (Florence: Nardini, for the Cassa di Risparmio di Fabriano e Cupramontana, 1992; ISBN 9788840411149). Booksellers’ records list it as a large illustrated volume of 276–280 pages, divided into three parts: “La pittura a Fabriano dal Duecento al Trecento”, “Gentile da Fabriano” and “La pittura a Fabriano dopo Gentile”. This is the “1992 survey” mentioned in earlier literature. Its structure is itself an argument: Gentile is framed as the culmination of a local tradition that begins with the Duecento and early Trecento masters.

In 1998 the Fabriano Gothic chapels received a monographic treatment of their own. An essay titled “Le cappelle gotiche di Fabriano: devozione e propaganda” appeared in Il Maestro di Campodonico. Rapporti artistici fra Umbria e Marche nel Trecento, a volume edited by the same author and published by Conerografica at Camerano in 1998. The title points to a reading of the chapels as instruments of Augustinian and Dominican self-presentation as well as devotion. This pass could not check the essay’s specific attributional conclusions.

Later still, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fabriano e Cupramontana paid for a restoration of the Gothic chapels in Sant’Agostino and San Domenico and published a volume on them: Le cappelle gotiche in Sant’Agostino e in San Domenico di Fabriano. La fondazione Carifac restaura l’antica pittura fabrianese, curated by Donnini with a specialist in Marchigian art, and published at Fabriano by the foundation in 2006 according to a published bibliographic entry. The Comune di Fabriano’s notice of the book’s presentation lists the two editors and a third scholar as speakers. Its chapter titles, as recorded in the foundation’s online edition, include “I capelli della Maddalena”, “La forza di persuasione di Sant’Agostino” and, significantly, “Lo stile degli autori” — the style of the authors, in the plural. That plural, in a volume of 2006, is an early and independent sign of the multi-hand reading that the 2014 exhibition made explicit.

The exhibition Da Giotto a Gentile. Pittura e scultura a Fabriano fra Due e Trecento opened at the Pinacoteca Civica “Bruno Molajoli”, housed in the former Spedale di Santa Maria del Buon Gesù, on 26 July 2014. It extended into the churches of Sant’Agostino, San Domenico and the cathedral of San Venanzio. The advertised closing date was 30 November 2014, and a contemporary review reports an extension to 18 January 2015 (a bookseller record gives yet another range). The Ministry chose it among the major cultural events of the Italian semester of the European presidency. The publisher’s description counts “circa novanta opere relative al contesto artistico umbro-marchigiano del XIV e XV secolo” in the Pinacoteca section; a review speaks of more than a hundred objects overall, including paintings, sculptures, miniatures and goldsmiths’ work. The catalogue was published in Florence by Mandragora in September 2014, not by Mondadori Electa as sometimes stated. It is about 310 pages, with ISBN 9788874612383, and an edition bound in boards (29 × 24.5 cm) is listed under ISBN 9788874612437. It was edited by the exhibition’s curator together with Donnini and a third co-editor, and a scientific committee chaired by the curator, including Donnini and the specialist of Riminese painting quoted below, oversaw the project. The publisher’s blurb states the exhibition’s aim: to establish “definitively the coordinates of a Marchigian, and in particular Fabrianese, school developed on the legacy of Giotto”.

The exhibition press list confirms that the Maestà was shown in the Pinacoteca as “Maestro di Sant’Emiliano, Maestà e Santi, affresco staccato”. A caption in the curator’s introductory essay, “La scuola di Fabriano e il ‘genio degli anonimi’”, identifies it as catalogue number 13: “Madonna in trono allattante il Bambino con i santi Lucia, Caterina d’Alessandria ed Emiliano”. In that essay the curator argues that the “Riminese language, also evident in the precocious Maestro di Sant’Emiliano”, visible in the Congiuntoli frescoes, “is not sufficient to exhaust the style of the same master”. That style, the essay says, is “manifested also in the frescoes of the two lateral chapels in the church of Sant’Agostino, very precocious (1311)”. The same essay quotes, in its second footnote, a specialist of Riminese painting. According to him the master had “known Riminese art” but “then gave life to an autonomous language, at times strongly synthetic, marked by a characteristic ductus — or rather by certain particular features, for example, in the faces, the omnipresent occhiaie a scodella — and by a rendering of the mural paintings with compact pastes, light colours, mostly based on earths and vegetable juices”. It adds that the painter was “probably born in Fabriano, and certainly active in the city and its surroundings”, and speaks of a “powerfully geometrising” manner, pointing to the folds of the garments of Saints Lucy and Catherine.

These quotations must be qualified. This pass could reach them only through search-result snippets of an online copy of the catalogue that looks unauthorised. No publisher page, scholarly review or academia.edu deposit confirmed them. They are consistent with one another and with the press coverage, and they are reported here as the catalogue’s text, but a reader should check them against a library copy. Three things follow from the snippets as they stand. The oft-quoted characterisation of the “occhiaie a scodella” is not the curator’s own coinage but his quotation of an earlier specialist, whose publication could not be identified. The date 1311 is advanced in the curator’s essay, in parentheses, as the date of the chapels. And some formulations circulating in earlier summaries could not be re-found in any accessible source in this pass. These are the description of the Maestà as “the highest and most intriguing example of the local early Trecento”, the reference to an Assisi-derived “herringbone” (a spina di pesce) spatial layout, and the detailed division of the chapels among “at least three hands under a single designer”, with the Magdalen stories given to the master and the Augustine stories to a broader group. They may well stand in the catalogue entries, which could not be consulted, but they are unconfirmed here and are treated as such below.

The source of the year 1311 can at least be traced. The Augustinian iconography site records that in 1311 the Fabriano convent sold a house and land “to meet the expenses”, in the context of the building and decoration of the church. If the site transmits the document correctly, the 1311 date is a documentary terminus for a campaign of works at Santa Maria Nova, not a date inscribed on the paintings. It is an attractive anchor, but it dates expenditure, not brushwork.

Fabriano Between Assisi and Rimini: The Historical-Artistic Context

To see why a painter of this profile appeared in Fabriano in the second decade of the Trecento, one has to picture the town’s position. Fabriano lay on the Apennine routes linking Umbria to the Adriatic. It was a commune of growing wealth, founded above all on paper-making, and from the late thirteenth century it was increasingly dominated by the Chiavelli family. The Augustinian convent of Santa Maria Nova, later Sant’Agostino, is said to have been founded in 1216 by Gualtiero di Ruggero Chiavelli and brought within the walls by his son Alberghetto at the start of the fourteenth century. The mendicant churches — Augustinian, Dominican and Franciscan — were the main commissioners of large-scale painting in the town.

The artistic currents reached Fabriano from two directions. From the west, across the watershed, came the example of Assisi. The painted Basilica of San Francesco was the great laboratory of central Italian painting, and its Lower Church was being decorated in the very years that concern us. The chapel of the Magdalen there, painted by Giotto and his workshop for the bishop of Assisi Teobaldo Pontano, is usually dated to about 1307–1308, on the strength of a notarial document of 4 January 1309 concerning Giotto’s affairs in Assisi. A Magdalen cycle of the highest prestige thus existed only a few years before a Magdalen chapel was painted in Fabriano. The Assisi chapel’s spatial devices, its fictive architecture and its narrative arrangement of the saint’s legend were available, in principle, to any Marchigian painter who crossed the mountains.

From the north and east, along the Adriatic, came the Riminese school. Its signed and dated monuments are few, but the essentials are secure. Giuliano da Rimini signed and dated a dossal in 1307, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and painted in the Marche, where frescoes at Fermo and the Crucifixion at Jesi are associated with him. Giovanni da Rimini is credited with the paintings in the chapel of the Virgin at the base of the campanile in Rimini’s Sant’Agostino, rediscovered after the earthquake of 1916 and dated to 1303 in the 2019 Silvana Editoriale monograph Il Trecento riscoperto. Gli affreschi della chiesa di sant’Agostino a Rimini; as a review in La Civiltà Cattolica puts it, “A Giovanni da Rimini si devono le pitture del 1303 nella cappella della Vergine”. Pietro da Rimini dominated the next phase from about 1320; an icon dated 1333 at Jesi is attributed to him. For Augustinian patrons in particular, Rimini offered an attractive model. The recent monographic literature on Rimini’s Sant’Agostino reads its decoration as an Augustinian challenge to the Franciscan patronage of Assisi. That reading suggests how naturally a Fabriano Augustinian convent might have turned to Riminese-trained painters for its own chapels.

The early Fabriano literature called the Sant’Agostino chapels “Riminese”. The later literature speaks of a “Giottesque-Riminese” formation. Both labels describe the meeting of these two currents in the valley of the Giano. They do not imply that the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano was trained in Rimini. What is argued is that he knew Riminese painting and Assisi’s Giottesque innovations and built from them a personal, more schematic language. The Pinacoteca’s short biography, quoted in full below, states the consensus fairly; the curator’s formulation, quoted above, puts the stress on autonomy.

The Maestà of Sant’Emiliano: A Nursing Madonna at the Origins of the Fabriano School

The fresco that gave the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano his conventional name is a monumental, almost perfectly square field of painting, conceived to stand behind the high altar of a Benedictine abbey church in the Apennines between Umbria and the Marche. Its near-square format — 349 by 346 centimetres — is itself eloquent: this is not a fragment of a narrative cycle but a self-contained devotional image on the scale of an architectural bay, a painted altarpiece avant la lettre. Since its detachment in 1907 it has anchored the Trecento rooms of the Pinacoteca Civica “Bruno Molajoli”.

The composition is governed by an exacting bilateral symmetry that the painter then quietly animates. At the centre, the Virgin sits on a broad marble throne beneath a projecting baldachin whose coffered soffit and dentillated cornice are drawn in convincing foreshortening; within it opens a tall pointed-arched niche, now darkened and abraded, which originally read as a shadowed apse behind the Virgin’s head. To either side the architecture steps back in depth: two raised loggias or balconies with parapets inlaid in Cosmatesque patterns — chequerwork, lozenges and discs in red, white and black — recede symmetrically towards the dark ground, the right-hand structure surviving in remarkably legible state, the left largely lost to a broad lacuna. The whole is closed above by a painted entablature carrying a guilloche frieze of interlaced ribbons and discs in earth reds, and below by a narrow Cosmatesque border of alternating triangles, so that the sacred scene appears to be viewed through the proscenium of an inlaid marble frame.

This architecture is the most Assisan feature of the painting. The perspectival canopy, the receding lateral structures and the fictive marble inlays descend from the illusionistic vocabulary developed in the Basilica of San Francesco, where painted architecture had learned to extend and complete real space. Here the device is put to a precise liturgical purpose: the converging orthogonals of the baldachin and the paired balconies construct, on the flat wall behind the altar, the monumental niche the little mountain church did not possess. The museum rightly singles out this “symmetrical-perspectival setting” as the work’s most notable trait; one might add that its symmetry is not inert but hierarchical, funnelling the eye from the outer saints, through the angels, to the axis of the Virgin’s head against the dark arch.

At the centre of this apparatus the solemn machinery of the Maestà is disarmed by a gesture of startling intimacy: the Virgin nurses her Child. She sits turned slightly to her left, her head — framed by a large halo with radiate punchwork and by a translucent veil over fair hair — inclined towards the infant with an expression of grave tenderness. With her right hand she offers the breast; the Child, seated across her lap in a golden-ochre tunic, grasps it with both hands and drinks, his crossed legs and sandalled feet rendered with an observational candour rare at this date. The motif of the Madonna lactans — the Virgin of Humility’s ancestor and the most corporeal of Marian images — transforms the theology of the apse wall: the Incarnation is asserted not by inscription or symbol but by the physical fact of nourishment, and the Virgin’s role as nutrix becomes a figure of her intercession, feeding the faithful as she feeds God. For the monks who celebrated Mass beneath her, the alignment of the nursing breast with the altar of the Eucharist can hardly have gone unremarked.

The Virgin’s drapery is the stylistic signature of the work. Her rose-pink robe, bordered at the neck with a dark ornamental band, disappears beneath a pale mantle that spreads across her knees in broad, luminous planes; the folds fall in long, ruled diagonals and crisp ridges, organised with an almost crystalline geometry that flattens even as it models. This geometrising treatment of cloth converts Giottesque volume into pattern: the body is present, but disciplined into an abstract order that suits the hieratic function of the image.

Behind the throne two angels stretch a great cloth of honour, patterned with a dense green-and-gold diaper of small geometric blossoms within lozenges. The angels emerge symmetrically above its upper edge, their wings spread flat against the architecture, their pale, round faces turned inward towards the Virgin; painted in light, almost monochrome flesh tones, they read as attendants of the architecture as much as of the Queen, ushers between the marble frame and the sacred centre. The cloth itself performs a double office: it isolates the Virgin chromatically from the fictive masonry, and its unbroken ornamental field — the most “textile” passage of the fresco — supplies the note of courtly luxury that the earth-based palette otherwise renounces. The device, widespread in central Italian painting around 1300, is here handled with notable spatial logic, the cloth hanging within the niche rather than merely behind the figures.

Three slender, elongated figures attend the throne, standing on the same fictive pavement and identified by the museum, from left to right, as Lucy, Catherine of Alexandria and the bishop Emilian.

Saint Lucy, at the far left, is the martyr of the group most cruelly treated by time: a large loss of plaster has carried away almost her entire face, leaving only the ghost of a halo and the fall of her hair. What survives is nonetheless telling — a tall, columnar figure in a red-brown mantle over a lighter robe, her right hand extended in a gesture that once presented her attribute, now lost. The elegance of the silhouette, all vertical continuity from shoulder to hem, matches her better-preserved companion opposite.

Saint Catherine, standing immediately to the right of the throne, is the best-preserved figure of the fresco and its quiet second protagonist. She turns in three-quarter view towards the Virgin, her right hand raised in a gesture of address or presentation; her face, with its high forehead, small mouth and deep, rounded eye-sockets, is the clearest surviving statement of the facial formula — the so-called occhiaie a scodella, “bowl-shaped” orbital hollows — that criticism has recognised as the master’s fingerprint. She wears a courtly gown whose ornamented bodice and jewelled neckline declare her royal rank, over which the pale skirt falls in the same ruled, parallel pleats as the Virgin’s mantle. Her canonical wheel, if it was ever shown, has not survived.

Saint Emilian, at the far right, balances Lucy’s column with the fuller mass of episcopal vesture. Mitred in white and red, bearded, his right hand raised in blessing and his left grasping a crozier whose volute is picked out with pastiglia-like ornament, he wears a red-brown chasuble over a green tunicle crossed by an embroidered orphrey. His identification rests on the dedication of the abbey rather than on any legible titulus — faint traces of painted lettering survive along the lower framing band, visible in good photographs, but no transcription has been published to my knowledge — and it remains, strictly speaking, a well-founded inference. As the titular of the church, he is the local pole of the composition: the two virgin martyrs bring the universal cults of light and wisdom, the bishop anchors the image to the community’s own patron and, through him, to the Numidian martyr tradition of the diocese of Gubbio.

Seen as a whole, the fresco declares a painter who had studied the two great novelties available to a Marchigian around 1310 — the Assisi workshops’ fictive architecture and the Riminese school’s grave, linear figure style — and fused them into an idiom of his own. From Assisi come the perspectival canopy, the Cosmatesque inlays and the ambition to build space; from Rimini the elongated canon, the ivory pallor of the flesh, the ornamental discipline. What is personal is the synthesis: a strongly simplified, almost abstract language in which faces repeat a single formula, folds obey a ruled geometry, and colour is held to a luminous restraint. The palette — pale roses, ochres, sage greens and earth reds on light grounds, the earth-based palette described in the 2014 catalogue — gives the great surface a matte clarity legible from the length of a nave. The museum dates the work to the second decade of the fourteenth century, and everything in it supports that placement at the head of the Fabriano school (see “Relationships to Contemporaries” below).

The fresco is explicitly recorded as incomplete, and the image makes the history of its survival legible. Broad losses of plaster disfigure the upper right quadrant and the left edge, obliterating Lucy’s face and much of the left balcony; the pointed niche behind the Virgin has darkened and abraded; the lower border is interrupted. The detachment of 1907 and the transfer to a stretcher inevitably lightened and flattened the surface, and any judgement of the original chromatic effect must allow for it. Yet the essential fabric of the image — the architecture, the Virgin and Child, Catherine and the bishop, the ornamental frame — survives with a completeness that few detached frescoes of this date can match, and the losses themselves, left as neutral patches, now document the ruin from which Miliani’s intervention rescued it.

The Gothic Chapels of Sant’Agostino: Architecture, Programme, and the Augustinian Hermits

The second pillar of the master’s corpus is the pair of Gothic chapels flanking the choir of Sant’Agostino in Fabriano. The church, founded as Santa Maria Nova, is documented under the Augustinian title only from 1457. It preserves its late-thirteenth-century exterior architecture and a notable Gothic portal of about 1300. Its interior was remodelled in the eighteenth century, with stucco decoration by the Swiss stuccoist Giacomo Cantoni carried out between 1756 and 1769 to a programme devised by an Augustinian of the convent. That remodelling isolated the two Gothic chapels. They were originally open to the church, and today they are reached through two small doors cut between the choir stalls. This accident of architectural history explains both their survival and their long obscurity: they were hidden spaces, “secret chapels” in the language of modern guidebooks, left behind the new choir.

Their modern history is one of intermittent recovery. According to the church’s documentation, restoration of the upper zone of the right-hand chapel began in the first decade of the twentieth century and was left incomplete. After the recovery of 1933–1951 described above, a further campaign, financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fabriano e Cupramontana under the direction of the competent Soprintendenza, preceded the monographic volume discussed above. The state of preservation is uneven. The frescoes of the right-hand chapel, formerly dedicated to Saint Augustine, are described as “in large part destroyed or seriously damaged”. The best-preserved paintings are four saints in the webs of the vault. The same restoration documentation describes efflorescences, dark stains from surface carbonation, and deposits from debris and pigeon guano on the vault, with fixatives applied over the painted surface. The chapels any modern viewer sees are in large part a restored, fragmentary palimpsest.

The programme belongs to the specific culture of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine. Recognised as a mendicant order in the mid-thirteenth century, the order spent the following decades building an identity that could compete with the Franciscans and Dominicans. Part of that effort was a claim to direct descent from Augustine as founder and legislator. In Fabriano the convent already had, in the second half of the thirteenth century, a fresco of Augustine delivering his Rule, by the painter known as the Maestro di Sant’Agostino, whose frescoes are now in the Pinacoteca and which Blume and Hansen associate, as a hypothesis, with the refectory. The early Trecento chapels take up the Augustinian theme; whether their designers knew the earlier frescoes is not shown by the evidence consulted. One is devoted to Augustine’s life and posthumous miracles, which assert his continuing protection of his followers. The other is devoted to Mary Magdalen, the model penitent and first witness of the Resurrection, a saint of particular resonance for an order of hermits dedicated to penance and preaching. The pairing, as the Augustinian iconography site observes, “respects the themes of Augustinian churches”. The subtitle of the 1998 essay, “devozione e propaganda”, names the double function well: private and communal devotion on one side, and institutional self-assertion in a competitive urban setting on the other.

A Hidden Wall of the Fabriano Trecento: Saints and a Monk’s Transitus in Sant’Agostino

This image shows the full height of the window wall of one of the two Gothic chapels — on the evidence of its subjects, the chapel formerly dedicated to Saint Augustine. A tall, deeply splayed lancet with modern leaded glazing of a cool blue pierces the centre of the wall; two registers of standing saints flank it; and above, in the lunette under the pointed vault, unfolds the narrative scene that Federico Zeri’s photographic archive files as Saint Augustine accompanying to heaven the soul of the monk Hugues de Fontenay. The image thus unites, in a single view, the two components of the chapel’s decorative system: the iconic (the flanking saints) and the narrative (the lunette), bound together by a continuous web of painted ornament.

The lunette is organised in two superimposed zones within one field. Below, on the earthly plane, a wooden bed carries the body of a dying or dead monk, stretched out under a dark coverlet; black-habited Augustinian Hermits attend the bed at either end, one kneeling in profile at the left, others gathered at the right, their dark silhouettes reading starkly against the pale ground. Above, the heavens open: a mitred bishop — Augustine himself — rises at the centre of the arch holding a small swaddled figure, the soul of the deceased, while four adoring angels in pale rose and cream robes press in symmetrically from either side, two and two, their haloes forming a garland around the saint. A long structural crack, now consolidated, descends diagonally through the scene.

The subject belongs to the posthumous and legendary matter that the Order of Hermits cultivated in the early fourteenth century. The transitus of Hugues de Fontenay is, strictly, a Cistercian legend — the monk whose soul Augustine came in person to escort — absorbed into the Augustinian repertory precisely because it dramatised the founder’s continuing care for those who died under his Rule. Painted directly above the window, at the visual summit of the chapel, the scene promised every friar who prayed here what it depicted: the bishop of Hippo present at the deathbed of his own. It connects naturally with the “deaths of Augustinian friars” that the church’s documentation lists among the chapel’s subjects.

The wall below is articulated as fictive architecture. Painted pilasters with Cosmatesque inlay — lozenges, chequers and discs in red, white and black — frame the window splay and the lateral fields; ornamental fasce run along the arrises; and the standing saints are set on painted corbels, like statues translated into fresco. This logic of feigned sculpture within feigned marble descends from the window walls of Assisi, where painted frameworks first learned to organise real architecture, and its presence here is one of the clearest signs of the Assisan component in the chapels’ design.

Of the four flanking saints, the best preserved is the upper left figure: a young female saint with fair hair, in a long white gown with a red-fringed attribute in her hand, her body swaying gently on the corbel. The upper right figure, largely lost to plaster falls, retains a haloed head and traces of pale drapery. In the lower register a female saint in a dark red mantle survives at the left with her face abraded away, and at the right stands a vested figure in red, perhaps a deacon or bishop. No published inventory secures their names; the church’s documentation speaks only of “figures of saints”, and prudence should follow it.

The stylistic evidence of this wall sits at the very heart of the attribution debate. This is the lunette that Zeri filed under the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino. Against it, the recent Fabriano literature reads the chapels as a collaborative campaign under a single designer. The viewer can test both positions here: the lunette’s figures are slender and pale, its angels grave and simplified, while the upper-left virgin below displays the ruled, geometrised drapery familiar from the Congiuntoli Maestà. Whether these are one hand or two remains the open question of the chapel.

The condition is uneven and honestly legible in the image. Broad losses of intonaco surround the window and have carried away most of the lower saints; the crack through the lunette has been filled; the neutral patches of restoration plaster map the ruin described in the conservation documentation. The blue glazing of the lancet is modern, and its cool light now sets the chromatic key of the whole wall.

Taken as a whole, the image shows why these spaces were worth hiding for. The remodelling that hid the chapels also preserved, almost by accident, a complete early Trecento decorative system — icon, narrative and ornament in their original hierarchy — of a kind that survives in very few Marchigian buildings. For the study of the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano and his circle, this wall is the indispensable document: the place where the master’s world can still be read in situ, from corbel to vault.

Rib vault with half-length saints in medallions — Gothic chapel, Sant’Agostino, Fabriano

This image looks straight up into the quadripartite rib vault of one of the chapels, the view di sotto in sù that a friar at prayer would have had. Four painted ribs spring diagonally to the central boss (now occupied by a modern light fitting), dividing the vault into four webs of deep blue-grey ground, each of which carried a medallion with a half-length holy figure. These are the paintings that the restoration documentation singles out as the best preserved of the chapel — the “four saints in the webs of the vault” — and the image confirms both the judgement and its limits.

Three of the four medallion figures remain legible. In the left web a frontal figure in a red mantle over pale drapery survives from the chest up, the head with short hair and a solemn, rounded face within a banded roundel. In the upper right web a mitred bishop, in red vestments with white gloves, holds a book and raises his right hand; in the lower web a second mitred bishop, younger-faced, displays an unfurled scroll inscribed with rows of pseudo-script. The fourth web is largely reduced to ground and losses. At the right edge of the frame the image catches, foreshortened, the upper corner of an adjacent wall lunette with a crowd of haloed figures.

The iconography of vault medallions in a mendicant chapel of this date usually presents the heavenly guarantors of the teaching below: Christ or a titular saint accompanied by Doctors, prophets or evangelists. The two mitred figures with book and scroll here declare precisely that magisterial authority — the scroll, held open toward the viewer, is the attribute of doctrine proclaimed — and in an Augustinian chapel one of them is very plausibly Augustine among his fellow episcopal Doctors. No published identification of the four figures is known to me, however, and the reading must remain at the level of type rather than name.

The medallion form itself carries a long genealogy. The clipeus with a half-length saint descends from Byzantine and Romanesque vault decoration and was naturalised by the Assisi workshops and the Riminese painters, whose chapel vaults at Rimini and in the Marche use the same device. The banded borders of the Fabriano roundels — concentric rings of colour, like painted rainbows — belong to that inheritance, and they tie the chapel’s heaven to the same Adriatic visual culture that shaped its walls.

The ribs are the vault’s ornamental glory. Each is painted as a polychrome shaft of superimposed patterns — chevrons, chequerwork, rows of discs and rosettes in earth red, ochre, black and white — the Cosmatesque repertory of the walls translated into radiating bands that draw the eye up to the boss. The effect is that of a ciborium in paint: the structural Gothic skeleton dressed as inlaid marble, so that the whole chapel reads as a precious reliquary turned inside out.

Stylistically the webs offer some of the chapel’s most quotable passages. The scroll-bearing bishop in particular shows the facial formula associated with the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano at close range: the firm oval, the small mouth, and above all the deep orbital hollows already seen in the Congiuntoli Saint Catherine. Whether the vault belongs to the designer himself or to the ablest of his collaborators is exactly the kind of question the multi-hand reading of the chapels invites.

The condition, though relatively good, is that of a survivor. Large islands of intonaco have fallen, especially in the left and lower webs; the blue-grey grounds are abraded to patchiness; and the vault bore the worst of the neglect recorded in the restoration documentation. The neutral fills now read as pale continents across the painted sky.

As a document, the image matters because vaults are where workshop practice is most visible. Painted from scaffolds in defined giornate, repeated across four symmetrical fields, the medallions permit exactly the kind of hand-by-hand comparison on which the attributional debate between the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano and the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino will ultimately be decided. Any future technical campaign in the chapels should begin here, at the top.

The Risen Christ shows his wounds (Incredulity of Thomas?) — Magdalen chapel, Sant’Agostino, Fabriano

This image is a close view of a narrative scene whose framing arch — a Cosmatesque band of white lozenges on red beside a green fascia — matches that visible in the sixth image, placing both details in the same chapel: the chapel of the Magdalen, where scenes from the life of Christ are recorded alongside the saint’s legend. Seven haloed figures fill the field in a compressed frieze before a rose-coloured architecture. At the right stands Christ, identified by his cruciform halo; from the left a group of apostles presses forward; and between them a youthful figure with long auburn hair reaches out to grasp Christ’s extended right hand.

The composition is built on a single meeting of hands. Christ, in a pale sage-green mantle over a tunic with an ornamented gold clavus at the breast, holds out his right hand, on the back of which a red nail-wound is distinctly visible; with his left he draws aside the edge of his mantle at the breast, where a further red mark appears. The reaching figure, in a golden-ochre mantle over rose, bends toward that hand with an intensity that the surrounding apostles echo in their turned heads and half-raised hands. The diagonal of the two arms, meeting at the wound, is the scene’s entire argument.

The identities of the bystanders are legible with unusual clarity. Immediately behind the protagonist stands Peter, unmistakable with his cap of grey curls and short grey beard; beside him an older apostle with a long dark beard, perhaps Andrew; at the far left a red-haired, red-bearded apostle in a cream mantle over dark red, and behind him further haloes. At the right edge a young, beardless apostle — John by type — closes the group behind Christ. The faces, remarkably intact, show the painter’s formula at its finest: firm ovals, small mouths, and the deep-set, bowl-like eye sockets of the Fabriano master’s manner, here softened by an attentiveness of expression.

The subject requires care. The gesture — a disciple verifying the wounds of the Risen Christ with his own touch — is that of the Incredulity of Thomas (John 20:24–29), and Thomas is conventionally shown, as here, young and beardless; the displayed nail-wound and the hand drawn to the breast (toward the lance wound) belong to the same ostentatio vulnerum. The figure’s long, loose auburn hair, however, gives it an androgynous cast that has evidently fostered confusion, and one can see why an unreliable modern description listed an “Incredulity of Thomas” for these chapels while others thought of the Magdalen before the Risen Christ. On the visual evidence, the Thomas reading is the stronger; but in a Magdalen chapel, where the saint is the first witness of the Resurrection, the ambiguity itself is eloquent, and the scene should be published with both readings stated.

Whatever the name, the theological point is single: the reality of the risen body, proved on the flesh. For an order of hermit-preachers the scene doubled as a lesson in faith confirmed by evidence — beati qui non viderunt — and its placement among the Magdalen stories binds her witness at the tomb to the apostles’ witness in the upper room, completing the chapel’s argument about testimony and belief.

Stylistically this detail is the best available touchstone for the claim, reported from the 2014 catalogue, that the Magdalen chapel’s narratives are “lucid, elegant” and belong to the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano’s own hand, with the memory of Assisi persisting. The compressed, overlapping frieze of heads, the pale rose-and-green palette on light grounds, the incised radiate haloes and the grave restraint of gesture all sit comfortably beside the Congiuntoli Maestà — the profile of the reaching figure could be Saint Catherine’s sibling — and the quality of the faces is unlike anything in the more summarily executed Augustinian scenes.

The condition is good precisely where it matters. The heads and upper bodies survive with their modelling intact; abrasion concentrates in the lower draperies and in the middle ground, where the rose architecture has thinned to a stain. The reds of the wounds, small as they are, remain vivid — a survival worth noting, since the entire meaning of the scene hangs on those few square centimetres of pigment.

As evidence, the detail carries weight beyond its beauty. If the Magdalen chapel is the master’s autograph zone, then this scene — with its secure Christ, its portrait-like Peter, its formula faces at their most refined — is the standard against which every other hand in the two chapels must be measured, including the lunette that Zeri removed to the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino. It is, in the precise sense, the master’s exhibit.

The Saint, the Tower and the Broken Fetters: Augustine’s Miracle in Fabriano

This image shows an entire narrative field of the Augustinian chapel, framed above and at the sides by Cosmatesque borders of lozenges and chequerwork: the miracle that local literature calls the Liberation of the prisoner — in one tradition, the prisoner of the Malaspina — and that the church’s documentation records as Augustine freeing prisoners. On a ground of deep night-blue, a mitred bishop saint rides in from the left on a white palfrey, escorted by angels, toward a tall rose-pink prison tower from which a captive is making his escape.

The composition is a diptych of powers. The left half belongs to heaven: the saint, in a white cope over pale vestments, his right hand raised in blessing, sits his horse with hieratic calm while three angels attend him — two at his back holding long-stemmed lilies, in rose and cream robes with golden wings, and a third flying in from above on outstretched brown pinions, hands opened in acclamation. The right half belongs to the world: the tower, rendered in warm pink masonry with a projecting wooden hoarding at its summit, fills the height of the field like a second protagonist.

The escape itself is told with anecdotal relish. The prisoner, in a short pale tunic, clambers down from a small opening in the tower’s flank, one foot planted on the shoulder of a companion who crouches beneath to receive him; a third man kneels lower still. In the middle ground a figure in brown strides toward the mounted saint holding up two small objects — on close inspection the broken fetters (or the shackle and its key) of the freed man, presented to the wonder-worker as proof and ex-voto. The gesture completes the circuit of the miracle: the saint blesses, the chains open, the evidence is returned to him.

The iconography belongs to the classic repertory of the thaumaturge-patron. Liberation of prisoners is among the oldest episcopal miracle-types — Nicholas of Myra and Leonard are its specialists — and its adoption for Augustine served the Hermits’ campaign to equip their founder with a full hagiographic apparatus. The local tradition that names the captors as the Malaspina, lords notorious in Apennine memory, would give the scene a pointed contemporary edge — sanctity trumping seigneurial violence — but that identification rests on popular literature and no published document, and it should be repeated only with that caveat.

The scene also carries a cautionary tale of its own about attribution. It is precisely this fresco that circulates in popular sources under the name of Allegretto Nuzi — a caption error descending from the old attribution of the Augustinian cycle to Nuzi before criticism moved it back into the earlier Trecento. The somewhat summary execution of the lower figures, beside the finer angels, is consistent with the multi-hand reading reported from the 2014 catalogue.

Stylistically the scene is a lesson in early Trecento narrative staging. The tower is not a backdrop but an actor, its hoarding drawn with the same care as the saint’s cope; the dark blue ground isolates the miracle like a nocturne; the horse, with its ornamented bridle and plumed headstall, introduces a note of chivalric splendour rare in the chapels. The angels’ faces, pale ovals with hollowed sockets, keep the connection to the master’s formula even where the execution broadens.

The condition is that of a hard-won survivor. A great loss of plaster has devoured the lower centre, taking the horse’s legs, the ground line and much of the presenting figure; further falls interrupt the tower’s base and the right margin; the blue ground is abraded throughout. Yet the essential narrative machine — saint, angels, tower, escape, fetters — survives complete enough to be read at a glance, which in a chapel described as “in large part destroyed” is itself remarkable.

Within the chapel’s programme the scene is the centrepiece of the founder’s active protection: where the transitus lunette promises help at death, the liberation promises help in life, against walls and chains. Devotion and propaganda, in the formula of the 1998 essay, here coincide exactly — the friar’s patron is also the townsman’s, and the pink tower on the blue ground remains, seven centuries on, the most memorable image the chapels contain.

A Body of Alabaster and a Thread of Blood: The Crucifix of the Gothic Chapel

This image isolates the head and torso of Christ from the Crucifixion that the church’s documentation lists among the subjects of the Augustinian chapel. Against a ground of deep slate blue, the ochre-gold beams of the cross carry a body of pale ivory, the head sunk onto the right shoulder, the arms drawn wide and sagging under their weight: the Christus patiens of the Giottesque tradition, rendered here with a restraint that makes its few accents of colour count double.

The anatomy is constructed in the master’s characteristic manner: broad, simplified planes of light flesh, the ribcage indicated by soft arcs of shadow rather than drawn ribs, the belly a single luminous volume above the transparent loincloth. Modelling is achieved almost without line, by the gradation of the pale pastes themselves, so that the body seems carved from a warm alabaster. The elongation of torso and arms, inherited from the Riminese Crucifixions of the same decades, gives the figure its note of exhausted grace.

The head is the detail’s centre of gravity. Within a great radiate halo — its incised golden rays interrupted by compartments of red set with painted jewels — the face falls forward in death or its approach: eyes closed, brows drawn, the long nose and small mouth framed by parted auburn hair and a short beard. The orbital hollows of the master’s formula are here given their most moving application, since the bowl of shadow now holds a closed eye.

One passage of colour breaks the restraint deliberately: from the wound in the right side, long rivulets of dark red blood stream down the flank and under the arm, drawn as parallel threads that curl at their ends. This calligraphy of blood, set against the otherwise bloodless pallor of the body, belongs to the new dramatic register that Riminese painting adopted between the second and third decades of the century — the same “course toward greater drama” that the encyclopaedic literature reads in the Jesi Crucifixion — and it shows the Fabriano workshop keeping pace with the Adriatic development.

Iconographically the image holds the exact midpoint of its tradition. It is no longer the triumphant Christ of the Romanesque crosses, not yet the convulsed sufferer of the later Trecento: the pathos is real but decorous, carried by the fall of the head and the stream of blood rather than by distortion. The comparison that imposes itself is with the mid-century Crucifixion of the Maestro di Campodonico, dated 1345, whose monumental drama makes this earlier image look, in retrospect, like its gentle premise — one measure of what the Fabriano school learned in a generation.

Technically, the blue ground has abraded to slate, and the halo’s ornament is achieved by incision and sparing colour rather than gilding. The transparent loincloth, painted as a grey veil over the flesh, is a small tour de force of the fresco medium, and survives well enough to be appreciated.

The condition is worn but legible. Scratches and small losses pepper the chest and shoulder; a patch of intonaco has fallen at the lower right of the torso; the ground has lost depth; yet the modelling of face and body, and crucially the blood, remain intact. As so often in these chapels, the damage reads as weathering rather than mutilation — the surface of a painting that spent centuries in a sealed, neglected room rather than under whitewash.

Within the chapel the Crucifixion anchored the entire programme: the miracles of the founder, the deaths of the friars, the transitus above the window all take their meaning from this body. Placed among the Augustine stories, it reminded the community that the saint’s power, like their own hope, flowed from the wounds displayed here — the same wounds that, in the Magdalen chapel next door, a disciple reaches out to touch.

Four Women Looking Up: The Magdalen’s Audience in Fabriano

This image is a detail from the Magdalen chapel — the framing arch at the right, with its lozenge band and green fascia, is the same that borders the scene of the Risen Christ — showing a group of four women who gaze and pray upward toward something at the upper left, outside the frame. Foremost stands a young woman wearing a golden crown with fleur-de-lis points; behind her, in ascending recession, three companions in headdresses; at the left edge, a mass of dark red drapery and a horizontal pole with a white cloth knotted over it mark the structure — a canopy, a pulpit, or an elevated figure — toward which all four look.

The composition is a study in directed attention. The four profiles and near-profiles form a rising diagonal from the front figure to the last; four pairs of hands are joined or folded in prayer; four chins lift at the same angle. Nothing else happens: the scene’s drama is entirely in the looking, and the painter has staged it with the economy of a relief, the figures overlapping like leaves against the night-blue ground.

The figures are individualised with unusual care. The crowned young woman wears a white gown crossed by jewelled orphrey bands at neck, breast and cuff, a white mantle falling from her shoulders — a costume of rank matching her crown. The second woman, youthful in a rose gown with a white draped headdress, opens her lips slightly as she gazes. The third, in ochre with a wrapped veil, is older. The fourth is the marvel of the group: an aged woman in grey-green, her headcloth bound close, her profile a map of wrinkles from hooded eye to sunken mouth — a passage of direct observation that steps momentarily outside the workshop’s facial formula.

The identification must be argued, since no published inventory of the chapel’s scenes exists. Within the Magdalen legend as the Golden Legend tells it, a crowned or princely woman among devout onlookers points to the Provençal chapters: the wife of the prince of Marseille, converted by the Magdalen’s preaching, or the witnesses of the saint’s miracles at Marseille. Given that the group gazes up at a draped structure at the left — compatible with the elevated position of a preacher, or with the Magdalen borne aloft by angels in her daily elevation — the most economical proposal is that we see the audience of the Magdalen’s preaching, led by the ruler’s wife. It is offered here as a proposal, not a fact; the popular tradition that the conversion of the Provençals is the chapel’s most striking episode supports it.

Iconographically the group performs the function that crowds perform throughout post-Assisi narrative: they are the congregation inside the picture, modelling for the congregation outside it the correct response to sanctity — attention, wonder, prayer. That the model audience is female, royal-led and age-graded from maiden to crone is not accidental in a Magdalen chapel: the penitent apostle’s preaching, which the Church allowed her uniquely among women, is shown converting precisely the whole span of womanhood.

Stylistically the detail strengthens the case for the Magdalen chapel as the master’s own zone. The two younger faces show the formula of the Congiuntoli Maestà — the firm oval, the small mouth, the shadowed socket — at its most refined; the drawing of the headdresses is crisp; the palette of rose, ochre and grey-green on dark ground matches the Risen Christ detail exactly. The old woman, meanwhile, shows what the formula could accommodate when the painter looked hard at a face: she is the chapels’ single most naturalistic head, and a datum for anyone mapping hands.

The condition is excellent precisely where the painter invested most. The four heads survive with modelling and even expression intact; abrasion affects the gowns, the dark ground and the left-edge drapery, whose subject it has helped to obscure. The framing border at the right retains its colour well and secures the detail’s location in the chapel.

As a document, the group tells us what the Fabriano master could do that the Maestà, by genre, could not show: sustain psychological variety across a crowd. Between the crowned girl’s rapt lift of the chin and the old woman’s effortful, skeptical squint lies a range of human attention that the “lucid, elegant” narratives of this chapel were praised for — and that no reproduction conveys as directly as this image.

Hands on Two Heads: Augustine’s Exorcism in the Fabriano Lunette

This image shows a complete lunette of the Augustinian chapel: a mitred bishop enthroned frontally at the centre extends both arms to lay his hands on the heads of two kneeling figures, one at either side, before two great hangings of patterned cloth; above each kneeling head, a small dark winged creature takes flight into the upper corners of the field. The scene corresponds to the episode that the iconographic literature lists among the chapel’s lunettes as the liberation of two possessed persons: Augustine, by the imposition of hands, drives out the demons, which are shown escaping as black, bird-like devils.

The composition is a diagram of the miracle, ordered with heraldic symmetry. The saint’s frontal, pyramidal mass — white robes under a red-brown cope, the mitre at the exact apex of the lunette — anchors the axis; his two arms, extended at matching angles, form the active diagonals; the two kneeling figures mirror one another at the base; the two cloths of honour close the field behind. Nothing is narrative in the temporal sense: the fresco presents the exorcism as a permanent, almost liturgical fact, an icon of the founder’s power.

The kneeling figures are laymen in courtly dress — at the left a youth in rose with a fitted cotte, at the right a long-haired figure in white — each holding a small white object against the breast, most plausibly votive candles or scrolls, the tokens of supplication. Their smallness relative to the enthroned saint restates the hierarchy of the miracle; their fashionable dress locates its beneficiaries in the world of the chapel’s urban patrons, who could see themselves in these two figures under the founder’s hands.

The demons are the scene’s forensic detail. The dark shape at the upper left — winged, long-tailed, perched for flight at the top of the hanging — and its damaged counterpart at the right are almost certainly the expelled spirits, rendered in the black, bat-bird form that Giottesque painting had standardised for devils leaving the possessed. Their placement directly above the patients’ heads, on the trajectory of expulsion, follows the convention exactly; only their abraded state counsels the small reserve of “almost certainly”.

The two cloths of honour deserve their own paragraph, for the painter has made them deliberately unlike: the left hanging carries a diaper of quatrefoils and crosses in red and blue on cream, the right a lattice of dotted roundels. This inventory of textiles — a connoisseur’s pleasure in itself, and a document of the silks then passing through Marchigian markets — also does compositional work, flattening the space behind the miracle so that the lunette reads as an icon on a patterned ground rather than a scene in depth.

Below the lunette the painter has drawn an illusionistic corbel table: a cornice of foreshortened brackets casting painted shadows, from which the field above appears to rise as from real architecture. This is the Assisan fictive vocabulary once more, and it binds the lunette to the chapel’s overall system of feigned marble and Cosmatesque banding, visible here in the archivolt’s chequered and lozenge borders. In the pale fascia beneath the cornice, faint dark strokes — visible especially toward the right — may be remnants of a painted titulus; no transcription has been published to my knowledge, and the traces would repay examination in raking light.

This lunette fits the same multi-hand reading: the conception — the heraldic symmetry, the textile grounds, the corbel table — is of the same intelligence that designed the Maestà’s fictive architecture, while the execution of the faces is broader than in the Magdalen scenes. The saint’s face, abraded and streaked by later staining, no longer permits fine judgement; the kneeling youths preserve the workshop’s formula in simplified form.

The condition is mixed: the field survives complete in its layout, but abrasion has thinned the saint’s face and vestments, dark drips have stained the centre, and losses interrupt the lower corners. Even so, as the one lunette of the cycle that can be photographed whole with its frame, cornice and hangings intact, it is the best single witness to how the chapel’s programme actually met its public: the founder enthroned between textiles, working his power on two kneeling contemporaries, with the defeated demons in full flight.

The Jesi Question and the Limits of the Corpus

The Pinacoteca’s biographical note on the painter reads in full: “Pittore di formazione giottesco-riminese, attivo nella prima metà del XIV secolo. A lui sono attribuiti gli affreschi di Sant’Agostino a Fabriano e in San Marco a Jesi”. The first half of the attribution matches the critical consensus, with the qualifications already discussed. The second half does not, and it must be corrected.

The church of San Marco at Jesi is one of the best Gothic buildings of the Marche. It keeps the remains of a fourteenth-century fresco decoration that once covered almost all its surfaces: a large apsidal Crucifixion, an Annunciation and a Translation of the Holy House of Loreto closing the right aisle, and a Dormitio Virginis on the south wall of the last bay. It was heavily restored between 1854 and 1859, when the vault and intradoses were largely repainted. Nineteenth-century connoisseurship, writing in 1887, proposed a Fabriano matrix tied to Francescuccio Ghissi and Allegretto Nuzi. Several early twentieth-century scholars instead argued for a direct derivation from Giotto’s Assisi models. The more recent restorations and specialist literature have settled the matter in favour of a Riminese matrix.

The authoritative statements are unambiguous. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale’s entry on Giuliano da Rimini treats the “great fresco with the Crucifixion in S. Marco at Jesi” as a late work within Giuliano’s orbit. It observes that it “still shows, somewhat impoverished, solutions developed in the early years of the century”, and that “the ungracious expressiveness of certain figures answers to the new course, towards greater drama, of Riminese painting between the second and third decade of the century”. A university exhibition based on a scholarly photo archive of Riminese Trecento painting dates the Jesi Crucifixion, with the Sassoferrato cross, to 1310–1320 and lists it among the works of Giuliano. The Fondazione Zeri catalogue files the Jesi Crucifixion under Giuliano da Rimini, citing four specialist studies published between 1988 and 2008. The back of one image in the archive carries Zeri’s autograph pencil note: “cerchia di Giuliano? / Jesi Ch. S. Marco”.

In none of these sources is the Jesi Crucifixion given to the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano. The general accounts of San Marco do say that the frescoes have been “ricondotti a Giovanni e Giuliano da Rimini e ad artisti di ambito fabrianese” — traced back to Giovanni and Giuliano da Rimini and to artists from the Fabriano sphere. That formulation, probably echoing the old Fabriano hypothesis and the possibility of Fabriano hands in the lesser scenes, may be the origin of the museum’s claim. But a vague “Fabriano sphere” is not an attribution to a named master. The only responsible conclusion is that the Jesi attribution is unsupported in the scholarly sources and should be removed from the painter’s corpus pending a specific published argument. The Jesi frescoes remain valuable for understanding the painter’s context: they show a Riminese painter working on a monumental scale in the Marche in the same years, and so represent the kind of model the Fabriano master could have known.

With Jesi removed, the corpus reduces to its core. There is the eponymous Maestà of Congiuntoli, the only work that defines the notname. There are the two Gothic chapels of Sant’Agostino, attributed to the master and his workshop since Molajoli, contested in part by Zeri in favour of the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino, and reaffirmed with a multi-hand reading by the recent Fabriano literature. And there are, perhaps, other scattered fragments that local descriptions of the Congiuntoli church mention without attribution — the ruined Saint Christopher, the reported second bishop — which cannot at present be assessed. A search of the Fondazione Zeri catalogue for works under the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano found nothing by that name, while the related Sant’Agostino material is filed under the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino. This archival fact shows how far the modern corpus is the product of Fabriano scholarship after Zeri rather than of the older connoisseurial consensus.

Style, Technique and Iconography

What, then, defines the style? Drawing on the eponymous fresco and the characterisations quoted in the 2014 catalogue, the master’s manner can be described under four heads.

The first is the figure. The master’s figures are tall and slender, and the museum’s adjective slanciate is apt. They combine the volumetric solidity learned from Assisi and Rimini with an elongation that makes them hieratic rather than naturalistic. Their faces follow a recurring formula whose most recognisable feature is the “occhiaie a scodella”, the deep, rounded hollows of the eye sockets. This trait is the strongest single argument for attributing the Sant’Agostino faces to the painter of the Maestà, and the most useful practical key for anyone approaching the chapels.

The second is drapery. The folds of the garments are organised geometrically, in repeated patterns that the catalogue essay calls “powerfully geometrising”. This tendency links the master to the broader Marchigian turn noted by observers of the 2014 exhibition: its curator spoke of “plastic, classical figures, which refer to the tradition of the Riminese school, but with something more schematic, almost geometric, that makes them unique”. The quality belongs not to the master alone but to the regional idiom he helped to found.

The third is space. The Maestà’s fictive architecture, discussed above, shows a painter who could turn Assisi’s illusions to the needs of a site, and the same vocabulary of painted pilasters, Cosmatesque bands and illusionistic corbels frames the walls and lunettes of the Sant’Agostino chapels.

The fourth is technique. The palette of “light colours, mostly based on earths and vegetable juices”, applied in “compact pastes”, gives a luminous, relatively matte surface suited to large mural fields seen at a distance. This is a mural painter’s craft, economical in materials and aimed at legibility. It contrasts with the gold-rich, punched and brocaded surfaces of Allegretto Nuzi’s mature panels.

Iconographically, the master’s surviving works are firmly within the conventions of his time, with two points of interest. The Madonna lactans enlarged into a monumental Maestà with saints is a choice that combines intimacy with solemnity, and it deserves study against Umbrian and Marchigian comparanda. The pairing of Magdalen and Augustine cycles in the Sant’Agostino chapels shows a programme tailored to Augustinian self-understanding, not a generic hagiographic sequence. In both cases the patrons’ concerns — a monastic community’s need for a focal image in an apseless presbytery, and a mendicant order’s need to assert its founder’s power — shaped what the painter did.

Chronology, Workshop and Attribution Debates

Chronology is the most contested area, and the evidence is thin. The only firm points are the museum’s dating of the Maestà to the second decade of the fourteenth century (a stylistic judgement, not a documented date), the reported 1311 document of expenditure at Santa Maria Nova, and the 1345 inscription on the Crucifixion of the Maestro di Campodonico, which gives a terminus for the next generation. Within these limits, the recent Fabriano literature has placed the Maestà and the Sant’Agostino chapels early — in the second decade, with the curator’s parenthetical “(1311)” for the chapels — and made the master “precocious”. Zeri’s reading, by giving part of the chapels to the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino, a painter with a mid-century profile in the Zeri archive, implies a later date for those parts.

The two positions need not be wholly incompatible. The chapels were painted over time by more than one hand, and they are a palimpsest of campaigns and restorations. It is possible that an early campaign by the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano and his collaborators, perhaps connected with the 1311 expenditure, was followed by later work in which a Riminese-trained painter such as the Urbino master took part. This hypothesis is offered as a way of reconciling the literature, not as a finding; testing it would need technical study of the plaster joins (giornate and pontate) and a scene-by-scene stylistic analysis. Until then, the sensible statement is that the chapels were painted in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century, that the master’s own hand is claimed for the principal parts, and that the extent of other hands, including the Urbino master’s, is disputed.

The workshop question follows from this. The reported division of labour (see above) is plausible in itself. It fits the scale of the undertaking, the uneven quality described in the Augustine chapel, and the plural “authors” of the restoration volume. But it rests on sources this pass could not confirm. What can be said with confidence is that no serious recent reading treats the chapels as the work of a single painter.

Relationships to Contemporaries

Three contemporaries or near-contemporaries define the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano’s place in the history of Marchigian painting.

The first is the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino, his rival claimant to the Sant’Agostino chapels. Both painters are described in the literature as Riminese in formation. Both were active in the Marche. And the Zeri archive gives the Urbino master a Fabriano presence, through the Barberini Birth of Saint John the Baptist from Santa Lucia, that makes his involvement at Sant’Agostino historically plausible. The difference between them, as the literature frames it, lies in the Fabriano master’s more synthetic, geometrising manner against the Urbino master’s openness to Umbrian and Sienese influence. Whether that difference can be seen reliably in the damaged chapels is the crux of the attribution debate.

The second is the Maestro di Campodonico, the most powerful painter of the Fabriano Trecento. He takes his name from the Crucifixion in the Benedictine abbey of San Biagio in Caprile at Campodonico. Its inscription,

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

records its execution in 1345 in the time of the abbot Pietro. The State acquired the Campodonico frescoes in 1966, and they belong to the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche; recent accounts report them displayed in the Pinacoteca Molajoli. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale entry on him makes the crucial link. It detects in his work “a Riminese substratum — probably mediated by the Maestro di S. Emiliano, also active in Fabriano”. That substratum, it says, is most evident in the Annunciation of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Fabriano, which it considers his earliest work despite doubts about the originality of its date. That Annunciation carries a graffito date of 1336, whose reliability is disputed, and it was rediscovered during works of the early 1930s undertaken at the initiative of the same Giovanni Battista Miliani who had paid for the rescue of the Congiuntoli fresco. The mature Crucifixion, by contrast, shows a meditation on Giotto’s Assisi and on Pietro Lorenzetti. On this reading the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano was the channel through which Riminese painting entered Fabriano and reached the next and greater generation, a genuine founder rather than merely the earliest name in a list.

The third is Allegretto Nuzi (c. 1320–1373), the central figure of the mid-century school, with Francescuccio Ghissi. Nuzi’s fresco cycles — the chapel of San Lorenzo in the cathedral, usually dated to about 1360 or 1365; the chapel of Sant’Orsola and the sacristy in San Domenico — and his polyptychs define the Fabriano school at its most characteristic. The literature describes their style as a precious, anti-naturalistic decorativism, at times close to abstraction, rich in brocades and punched gold. Nuzi was long credited with the Augustine cycle itself (see above). The development from the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano’s compact, earth-based mural painting to Nuzi’s golden abstraction is the arc of the Fabriano Trecento. The geometrising schematism common to both suggests a local tendency that persisted across two generations.

Legacy and Current State of Research

The legacy of the Maestro di Sant’Emiliano is chiefly historiographical and institutional. Critically, he is the fixed point from which the story of a Fabriano school is told. The 1992 survey, the 1998 volume, the restoration monograph and the 2014 exhibition all place him at the start of a line that runs through the Maestro di Campodonico to Allegretto Nuzi, Francescuccio Ghissi and, in the long view, Gentile da Fabriano. Institutionally, his eponymous fresco is one of the Pinacoteca Molajoli’s signature works, and it now has a physical double in the full-scale copy at Congiuntoli. That copy restores to the apseless presbytery at least the image of its lost altar painting, and it has become the focus of the abbey’s modest revival as a visitor site.

The state of research is less settled than the confident summaries of guidebooks suggest. Three kinds of work are needed. The first is documentary: publication of the Soprintendenza and museum records of the 1907 detachment, verification of the Roman fragment, and a critical edition of the Congiuntoli and Santa Maria Nova documents, including the reported 1311 sale. The second is technical: a campaign of diagnostic study on the Maestà and the Sant’Agostino chapels that would test the reported “compact pastes” and earth-based palette, map the giornate, and establish the sequence of hands and campaigns. The third is bibliographic and critical: a proper edition of Molajoli’s 1934 note, a re-reading of Zeri’s 1950 article against the chapels as restored, and an open publication of the 2014 catalogue entries, so that quotations now circulating through unauthorised copies can be checked.

Conclusion

The Maestro di Sant’Emiliano is the anonymous painter who, in the second decade of the fourteenth century, turned the Giottesque and Riminese novelties of Assisi and the Adriatic into the first recognisably Fabrianese idiom. He painted the monumental nursing Maestà of Congiuntoli and led the decoration of the Gothic chapels of Sant’Agostino in Fabriano. His name refers to a Gubbio-diocese abbey on the Umbria–Marche border and to its Numidian patron. It has nothing to do with Trevi or Spoleto, and readings that place him in the Valle Umbra should be dropped. His secure corpus is small: the Maestà, and the chapels with a disputed share of other hands, among whom Federico Zeri identified the Maestro dell’Incoronazione di Urbino. The frescoes of San Marco at Jesi, still credited to him in the Pinacoteca’s note, belong in the specialist literature to Giuliano da Rimini or his circle, and should be removed from his catalogue.

His critical history is a story of civic historiography meeting connoisseurship. Bruno Molajoli, writing in 1934 on newly uncovered “Riminese” frescoes, gave Fabriano a founding master. Federico Zeri in 1950 took part of that master’s work away in favour of a wider Marchigian-Riminese picture. Giampiero Donnini and the 2014 exhibition restored and dated him, reading him as “precocious” and autonomous and attaching the year 1311 to the chapels. Each stage was shaped by the physical state of the works: the rescue of the fresco by an industrialist’s money, the demolition of partitions in 1933, and successive restorations. Each left questions the next could not answer. What can be said with confidence is enough to justify the painter’s place at the head of the Fabriano school. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale itself recognises him as the probable mediator of the Riminese substratum behind the Maestro di Campodonico. His distinctive traits — slender, geometrised figures, bowl-shaped eye sockets, and luminous earth-based murals within symmetrical fictive architecture — mark the beginning of a regional school that would culminate, a century later, in one of the great painters of Europe.

The Maestà remains the measure of everything else. Its handling of a difficult site shows a painter who understood what a small Benedictine community needed from its principal image, not merely one who repeated formulas learned elsewhere. Whatever is later decided about the chapels, the fresco alone is enough to establish a painter of real intelligence. Any enlargement of the corpus has to be justified against it, not against the looser idea of a “Fabriano manner”.

For the chapels, the multi-hand reading changes the terms as much as the attributions. Applied to Sant’Agostino, the notname should be read as covering a designer and his workshop, not a single brush. The useful question to ask of each scene is therefore not whether it is “by” the master, but how closely it follows the standard set in the Magdalen chapel.

The painter is also a product of geography. His two surviving commissions came from a Benedictine abbey in the diocese of Gubbio and a mendicant convent in a Marchigian paper town, a few kilometres and one watershed apart. His models reached him from two directions, from Assisi across the mountains and from Rimini along the Adriatic, and even the Maestà’s journey to Fabriano followed the same eastward pull. The categories of “Umbrian” and “Marchigian” painting, useful as they are for later periods, fit this master poorly. The Fabriano school was, from its first generation, a phenomenon of the Apennine border, formed by roads, monastic networks and patrons whose interests ran across the modern regional line.

The case also teaches a lesson about evidence. Many of the errors corrected in this essay did not arise from bad scholarship. They travelled through institutional summaries and popular websites that copy one another, and each copy lent them a little more apparent authority. A museum label, an encyclopaedia entry or a regional news report can fix a date or an attribution in public memory long after the specialist literature has moved on, or before it has spoken at all. For a painter known only through a handful of damaged surfaces, the distinctions set out in the introduction are not pedantry but the only protection the evidence has.

None of the open questions is marginal. A secure date for the chapels would decide whether the master was as precocious as the Fabriano literature claims. A clear division of hands would decide whether Zeri’s Urbino master was a collaborator, a successor or a rival. And a published catalogue text would show how much of the current consensus rests on quotations no one has checked. A history of the Fabriano Trecento should be written so as to absorb such corrections rather than resist them.

The name “Maestro di Sant’Emiliano” has earned its place. It names a manner that can be recognised in a handful of surviving surfaces, a moment in the second decade of the fourteenth century when Giottesque and Riminese painting were first made local, and a place on the border between Umbria and the Marche. Today the original fresco hangs in Fabriano while its full-scale copy stands in the abbey where it was painted, one on each side of the watershed that shaped the painter’s world. Between them lies the beginning that Fabriano’s painting needed: modest in extent, uncertain in many details, but real enough to carry the history that followed.