Polyptych with the Coronation of the Virgin, an Imago Pietatis, St. Perpetua and the Annunciation

The saint in the left-hand panel, in a position of honour, was identified as Perpetua by Golfieri, the first critic to publish the fresco in 1955. The saint was persecuted by Septimius Severus for her Christian faith in the 3rd century AD, and sentenced to death ad bestias (i.e. to be attacked by fierce wild beasts) in the amphitheatre in Carthage, where she was wounded by a wild cow before being knifed to death by a gladiator ¹ .
Golfieri based his identification of Perpetua – shown with the palm of martyrdom and a book which may allude to the Passio S.S.Perpetuae et Felicitatis – on the fact that the fresco comes from the abbey church of Sts. Felicita and Perpetua in Faenza, from where it was detached and transferred onto canvas after World War II (Saviotti Naldoni 2019).

Golfieri also linked the fresco to St. John the Baptist and the Sainted Warrior Martyr on display in the same room in the Pinacoteca di Faenza (inv. 94, 95), while Corbara (1964) noted its Late Gothic style typical of Faenza was closely related to the paintings in the choir lofts of the city’s cathedral. Anna Tambini (1980) subsequently grouped all the above works under the name of the Master of St. Peter Damian, and Mauro Minardi (1999, p. 121, no.5) added the group to the catalogue of the Castrocaro Master ² , identifying the painter as an artist from Faenza named Guglielmo di Guido di Peruccino, who is recorded from 1418 to 1459 ³ .

Where the fresco’s dating is concerned, its provenance allows us to use the year 1444 as a terminus ante quem because that was the year in which the canons took up residence in their recently built abbey (Tambini 2007). If we agree in identifying the Master of St. Peter Damian as Guglielmo di Guido di Peruccino, we need to take as our terminus ante quem the year 1439, which coincides with the painter’s return from Forlì ⁴ .

Anna Tambini (2007) has identified both the painter’s ties with local artistic tradition and his potential sources of inspiration. First of all, the idea of a fresco imitating a polyptych may have been inspired by a monochrome fresco painted by Jacopo di Paolo in the church of San Francesco in Faenza. Tambini (1982) had previously linked the fresco to a polyptych by Bitino da Faenza depicting the Coronation of the Virgin (formerly in the Dragonetti De Torres Collection in L’Aquila), in which the scenes are similarly set between two spiral Solomonic columns, the Coronation of the Virgin and the angels holding the curtain in the central panel beneath a trilobate arch, the saints in the side pilasters and the Annunciation in two pinnacles. She has also compared the fresco with a polyptych in the Museo Diocesano di Imola by Giovanni da Riolo, an artist with whom Guglielmo di Guido di Peruccino was in close touch and in whose work “the Late Gothic style” similarly “coexists alongside hints of the Early Renaissance” (Tambini 2007, p. 140).