A Sainted Warrior Martyr

Anna Tambini rechristened the anoymous painter “the Master of St. Peter Damian” in 1980,
putting together a small corpus of stylistically similar works. She completed the Pinacoteca di Faenza’s
two small panels depicting St. John the Baptist and a Sainted Warrior Martyr ¹ ,
with a panel cut into an oval shape depicting the Madonna and Child now in the Museo Diocesano di
Arte Sacra di Faenza and a panel depicting St. Peter Damian in the Museo d’Arte della Città di Ravenna (inv. QA0103), arguing that they all once belonged to the same polyptych.

This polyptych is highly likely to have stood in Santa Maria foris Portam in Faenza, the church of
a monastery dependent on Fonte Avellana in which St. Peter Damian had died and was buried ² . The central panel with a Madonna and Child, known as the
Madonna della Tosse (Madonna of the Cough), remained in situ until 1778, when it was moved to the church
of Santa Maria dell’Angelo (Tambini 1982, p. 144).

Equally important is a description penned by a painter named Carlo Cignani who, when visiting
the sacristy in the church of Santa Maria foris Portam in 1701–3, saw four panels from the same
polyptych, which had already been dismantled, depicting St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Benedict and St. Peter
Damian (Tambini 1980, p. 57 nota 14). Miklós Boskovits (note in Benati 2003, pp. 94-99) subsequently
discovered the two panels depicting St. Peter and St. Paul, which were acquired by the Museo Diocesano
di Arte Sacra di Faenza in 2004 (Benati, 2003, pp. 94-99; Tambini 2012, p. 416), but the whereabouts of the panel with St. Benedict mentioned by Cignani are still unknown. A small panel from the same polyptych depicting St. Jerome “dressed as a Cardinal, with his hat on his head, as he removes the thorn from the lion’s paw” was recorded in the Pinacoteca di Faenza over a century ago (Bagli 1890) but again, its current whereabouts are unknown.

Guglielmo di Guido del Peruccino also produced a second polyptych, this time in a fresco in the
church of Santa Perpetua (now detached, it is currently in storage in the Pinacoteca di Faenza). On the
strength of the latter, Anna Tambini (Tambini 2012, p. 419) reconstructed the likely structure and
arrangement of the polyptych to which the two saints belonged, placing the Madonna della Tosse in the
centre of the work with St. Peter on the right and St. Paul on the left, St. Peter Damian on the far left and
the lost St. Benedict on the far right. In the upper register, she placed St. John the Baptist and St. Jerome
above St. Peter and St. Paul respectively, and the small panel with the Sainted Warrior Martyr above the
lost image of St. Benedict on the far right of the structure.

In view of the polyptych’s original location, however, it is arguable that St. Benedict and St. Peter
Damian, who were the object of special devotion in Santa Maria foris Portam in Faenza, stood in a
position of honour close to the central panel rather than on the edges of the structure.

The Pinacoteca’s two small panels have been attributed in the past to local such painters as Pace
(Faenza 1875, p. 48), Ottaviano (Argnani 1881) and Bitino da Faenza (Bagli 1890), but since the time of Golfieri (1955) scholars have tended to identify the Master of St. Peter Damian as a painter from
Faenza named Guglielmo di Guido del Peruccino (Benati 2003; Tambini 2001, p. 32; Tambini 2007),
who is recorded from 1418 to 1459 and whose father entertained relations with Santa Maria foris
Portam in his day (Grigioni 1935). Further exploration of the hypotheses surrounding this artist, who is
currently known only from archive documents, would prove extremely useful. (Turchi 2009, p. 8).