Madonna and Child Enthroned with St. Michael the Archangel and St. James the Less, in the lunette God the Father with Seraphim

This large altarpiece, the original frame of which has unfortunately been lost, comprises two parts. The lunette above has a bust of God the Father in the act of blessing, supported by Seraphim, while the altarpiece proper, below, hosts a Sacred Conversation.

Beneath the vault of a majestic, classicising building clad in polychrome marble, the Virgin Mary is seated in the centre of the composition on an intricate pedestal-cum-throne resting on eight pilasters with pyramid-like decorations. The baby Jesus sitting in her lap is imparting a blessing. Below, on either side of the throne, we see the St. Michael the Archangel in shining armour wielding his sword on the left and the apostle St. James the Less reading a book on the right. In the background, beyond a marble parapet decorated with a frieze of plant tendrils, we can make out a mountainous landscape dotted with thick vegetation and inhabited by a number of figures.

Above a fortress in the upper left-hand corner, we see St. Michael the Archangel again, in a scene from a legend according to which, during an outbreak of the plague in Rome, he appeared to Pope Gregory the Great above the remains of the Emperor Hadrian’s Mausoleum and the plague abated at once. The building was known from then on as the Castel Sant’Angelo in memory of the miraculous event, its shape echoed in the structure of the fortress depicted in the altarpiece (Benati 2011). Beneath the fortress we see a bull resting in a clearing, its presence alluding to another legend associated with the cult of St. Michael. According to this legend, a bull escaped from its master on the Monte Gargano peninsula in Puglia, finally coming to a halt and kneeling down by a cave on a mountain. When the master finally found the bull after searching high and low, he was unable to persuade it to return to the herd, and so he shot an arrow at it in anger. Miraculously, the arrow turned back and lightly wounded the man (as we can see in the upper right-hand of the painting). Disturbed by all of this, the man went to report to the Bishop, who believed him and ordered three days of prayer. When the three days were up, St. Michael the Archangel appeared and ordered the construction of a sanctuary by the cave that was to become known as the Sanctuary of San Michele a Monte Gargano, one of Europe’s most important pilgrim destinations in the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Another two figures on the lower right of the picture may be identified as St. Anthony the Abbot, dressed in a dark robe and holding a stick, and St. Paul the Hermit, with a long beard and a white tunic. Jacobus de Varagine tells us in his Golden Legend that the ageing St. Anthony went to visit St. Paul, who was well over a hundred by then and whom Christian tradition considers to be the first hermit. shortly before he died. The presence of St. Anthony may allude to the name of the patrons who commissioned the altarpiece, Antonio Santi and Antonio Maneghelli, Priors of the Compagnia di San Michelino in Faenza which was also known as the Compagnia dei Battuti Rossi (Forlì 2011, p. 385). In a contract drafted on 12 June 1497 now in the Faenza State Archive (ibid.), Marco Palmezzano pledged to the Compagnia that he would deliver by April of the following year an altarpiece that the document specified should be the “worthiest” and the “most beautiful” of all those existing in Faenza at the time. The artist was also bound to use oil paint and to purchase the most valuable pigments and the finest gold for the painting. Another document (in Forlì 2011, p. 386) informs us that the work was paid for on 16 March 1500. The altarpiece was placed in the (now destroyed) church of San Michelino, before being moved to a girls’ orphanage founded in 1542 and run by the same confraternity (which is why it was also known as the “Orfanotrofio delle Micheline”. For the orphanage’s history, see Archi, Piccinini 1973). In 1811, the orphanage was transferred to the building that once housed the monastery of San Paolo in what is now Via Cavour (ibid.), which is where it was seen by Charles Lock Eastlake, the Director of the National Gallery. Starting in 1859, he made several attempts to buy it for his museum in London, offering generous sums of money to the orphanage. His move, however, aroused the interest of several Faenza scholars, who appealed to the local authorities to prevent what would have been a very serious loss to the city’s art heritage. Fortunately, nothing came of the negotiations with the National Gallery and the Comune di Faenza purchased the altarpiece for the city’s art collections in 1879 (this gripping story is reconstructed in detail in Casadei, 2005).

In the first half of the 19th century it was thought that the Micheline Altarpiece was by the hand of Melozzo da Forlì, until Gian Marcello Valgimigli published the contract commissioning it in 1857. The altarpiece was instantly held up as one of Marco Palmezzano’s finest achievements and no one has questioned its attribution to him since then.

In stylistic terms, Marco Palmezzano’s atmospheric handling of light and his use of jewel-like hues illustrate Venetian painting’s strong influence on him, which only grew after his recorded stay in the lagoon city in 1495. The Virgin’s rounded face is reminiscent of that of several Madonnas painted by Cima da Conegliano, while the background recalls the luminous landscapes of Giovanni Bellini. The strongly foreshortened architecture and the bizarre decorative motif with its pyramid-like ornaments (also found in other work by the artist, for instance the altarpiece in the church of San Francesco in Matelica or the Madonna and Child Enthroned with St. John the Baptist and St. Philip Benizi in the collections of the Cassa di Risparmio di Cesena, inv. no. 519) are the result of his apprenticeship to Melozzo da Forlì, whom Vasari called a master of “foreshortening”. As both Carlo Grigioni (1956, p. 420) and Daniele Benati (2011) point out, the throne’s complex architecture also points to the artist’s familiarity with Ercole de’ Roberti’s celebrated Santa Maria in Porto Altarpiece painted in 1481, which could be seen in the church of Santa Maria in Porto Fuori near Ravenna in his day and which is now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (inv. no. 203). Palmezzano used the composition of God the Father imparting a blessing with Seraphim on several other occasions, for example in the lunette of his Road to Calvary now in the Galleria Spada in Rome (inv. nos. 159, 160). The faces of the Seraphim are reminiscent of those frescoed in the dome of the Feo Chapel in San Biagio in Forlì. These frescoes were begun by Melozzo in 1493 and completed by Palmezzano on Melozzi’s death in 1494, but were tragically destroyed by bombing in 1944.