Imago Pietatis

The Faenza tondo depicts an Imago Pietatis, in other words the dead Christ rising from the tomb with his outstretched arms resting on its sill to display his stigmata and the wound in his side. This iconography originally developed in the Byzantine East before spreading to Italy (particularly the region around Venice) in the course of the 13th century. Michele di Matteo was to return to it in other work, for example in a small panel in the Pinacoteca Nazional di Bologna (inv. no. 847, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna), in a predella fragment in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore (inv. no. 37.738) and in the predella of a polyptych from the Abbey of Nonantola (now in the Museo Benedettino e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra).

The Pinacoteca di Faenza tondo is also likely to have formed the central part of a predella (Tambini 1982 p. 139; Anselmi 2011, p. 47), although it has to be said that no such solutions are found in any of Michele di Matteo’s definite works.

The Faenza tondo has had a complex critical history. Corbara (1951) was the first, in the wake of an oral communication from Longhi, to attribute it to the hand of Michele di Matteo, rejecting its traditional attribution to Simone dei Crocefissi. Archi (1957) attributed it generically to the Bolognese school, while Bentini (1968–9), Casadei (1991), Lollini (2002, p. 204) and Tambini (1982; 2007) accepted Corbara’s proposed attribution. In Anna Tambini’s view (ibid.), Christ’s face is very close in its delicacy to the face of Mary in the Dream of the Virgin in the Museo Civico di Pesaro (inv. no. 4547). She dated the Faenza panel to c. 1440 (subsequently opting for the broader range of 1430–40 in 2007) on the strength of the fact that it is still visibly influenced by Venetian painting. Michele di Matteo was in Venice from 1431 to 1436, where he managed to soften his typically “rustic Bolognese Gothic gravitas” (Bottari, 1957–8) on becoming acquainted with the painting of Iacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono.

De Marchi (1999), on the other hand, rejected the attribution to Michele di Matteo in favour of an attribution to the Master of St. Peter Damian, yet he failed to offer any comparison to back up his contention. Thus his proposed attribution was dismissed by Anna Tambini (2007), who failed to detect any convincing comparison with the Imago Pietatis in the cimasa at the top of the Master of St. Peter Damian’s fresco from the church of Santa Perpetua (on display in the same room in the Pinacoteca di Faenza). Tambini went on to highlight the distance between Michele di Matteo’s delicate style and the “sharp hand” of the anonymous Master from Faenza, suggesting that the tondo should be associated with the Ferrarese school, which was already well documented in Romagna at the time, and drawing parallels with the Crucifix in Santa Maria delle Grazie a Covignano, dated 1430.

Anselmi (2011) also questioned the attribution to Michele di Matteo in view of the tondo’s inferior quality compared to his average output, assigning it instead to a painter in Michele’s workshop, who may well be the same artist that painted the tondos in the frieze on the balustrade in the Vasselli Chapel in San Petronio. In any event, Anselmi (p.47) proposed dating the tondo to the years in which the polyptych for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi (inv. no. 247, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna) was painted.