St. George

St. Roch is portrayed, in accordance with traditional iconography, as a young pilgrim with a hat tied around his shoulders while pointing to the bubo on his thigh. St. Francis is depicted as Alter Christus, showing his stigmata and the wound in his ribcage, an allusion to the sacrifice of Christ, while holding a crucifix in his left hand. And St. George, in a soldier’s attire, treads on the defeated dragon while brandishing aloft his triumphant standard with its red cross.

That the three panels once belonged to the same polyptych was first surmised by Corbara (1939), and later confirmed by Anna Tambini (1982) on the strength of the haloes’ identical dimensions. The rotation of the bodies and the manner in which they are foreshortened might point to their respective positions with regard to the now lost panel that once stood in the centre of the polyptych: St. Roch on the left, St. George on his right and St. Francis on the left, although the latter panel’s smaller size by comparison with the other two suggests that it is likely to have stood on an upper register in the polyptych (Tambini 2007, p.148). On the painted surface we can see the incisions made for inserting the capitals separating the panels of the polyptych, of whose original location we know nothing.

The Pinacoteca di Faenza’s three saints have been variously attributed to Ottaviano da Faenza (Argnani 1881); to Bitino da Faenza (Becherucci 1938; Salmi 1935); to Francesco Torelli (Corbara 1939, Golfieri 1990); to an anonymous artist of Faenza painting in the style of Venice and the Marche, close to Francesco da Faenza (Golfieri 1955); to a follower of Antonio Alberti (Corbara 1964); to an anonymous Late Gothic artist with northern European influence mediated by local works; in parallel with such artists as Giambono (Padovani 1971), Giovan Francesco da Rimini (Minardi 1999) and even Bembo’s tarot cards and the Zavattari brothers (Tambini 1982; 2007).

In effect, the artist has no precise counterpart in the Faenza area aside from a strong expressionistic component found in the work of the Master of St. Peter Damian on display in the same room in the Pinacoteca (Tambini 1980). Anna Tambini has attributed a panel with a Madonna and Child now in the Pinacoteca Stuard in Parma (https://bbcc.regione.emilia-romagna.it/pater/loadcard.do?id_card=203807) to the same hand, although it was previously attributed to the circle of Giovanni da Modena with a date of c. 1440 (E.Negro, in Il tempo di Nicolò III. Gli affreschi del castello di Vignola e la pittura tardogotica nei domini estensi, exhibition catalogue (Vignola, May – June 1988) ed. D. Benati, J. Bentini, Modena 1988 p.150, cat.26).