Crucifixion and Ascension of St. John the Evangelist

Garrison was the first to coin the name “Master of Faenza” in 1949, precisely on the strength of this small panel in the Pinacoteca Comunale with scenes painted in two superimposed registers divided by a red frame that appears to be supported by two small, foreshortened corbels. The figures in the upper scene tread on the frame to create an effect of depth and a hint of spatial realism. In the Crucifixion, painted in the upper register, Christ on the cross is surrounded by the three Marys, St. John the Evangelist and St. Peter. The fact that St. Peter’s presence here is out of context suggests that it may be a reference to the patron who commissioned the panel.

Scholars have invariably interpreted the Ascension of St. John the Evangelist in the lower register as Christ’s Descent into Limbo ¹ . The scene – which, on the contrary, allows us to identify St. John the Evangelist if for no other reason than that he is shown wearing the same clothes as in the Crucifixion above – is in fact one of the apocryphal stories that first appeared in the Acts of John (Acta Ioannis), a text already in circulation in the 2nd century AD ² . The story goes that St. John the Evangelist asked some men to dig him a deep grave and that, when they had finished, he had himself lowered into the grave, raised his arms to heaven and prayed to Christ to receive his soul. To the onlookers’ astonishment, John was promptly taken up bodily into heaven. The two figures behind Christ – who are not mentioned in the text – may be the saints welcoming John into Paradise, or else they may appear in some currently unknown medieval variant in the Acts.

Ever since the first attempts at attribution made by Van Marle (1923) who detected certain Gothic elements in the work, scholars have invariably offered extremely generic definitions of the artist’s personality. He has almost always been said to have worked at the turn of the 13th century and to have been a native of Romagna (Servolini 1944; Archi 1957), of Emilia-Romagna (Tambini 1982) or of Bologna (Garrison 1949), scholars also highlighting his closeness to the illuminators then working in that city ³ .

Luciano Cuppini was the first to associate the Faenza panel with three small panels in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna: the Disrobing of Christ (stolen in 1963), the Deposition from the Cross and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ ⁴ . The three panels, in which the decoration of the haloes is identical and which are of the same size ⁵ , would thus have formed part of single six-panel altar frontal, with the Faenza panel in the middle, but excluding from the group the Nativity (inv. no. 310, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna) which is considered to be by the Master of Forlì. Giovanni Valagussa (2002), for his part, rejects the hypothesis ⁶ , highlighting the fact that the Faenza panel, in which the artist appears to be aware of Giunta Pisano’s later work, was painted in a more mature style than the Bologna panels (its stylistic proximity to the work of Giunta Pisano has also been underscored by Corbara 1951; Tambini 1982, p. 48; Valagussa 1995, p. 146; Giorgi 2004) and should therefore be dated to some time around the 1280s ⁷ .

Anna Tambini (2006) has suggested, albeit without finding any confirmation for her suggestion, that the panel may have come from the old Augustinian church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Faenza, which was built between 1266 and 1290. At an unspecified date, the panel was shorn of a few centimeters on its upper and lower edges, a detail particularly noticeable in the figures of the grieving angels in the Crucifixion scene.