A delicate Umbrian artist of the 14th century: the Crucifixion of the Master of Fossa

One cannot say one has known Umbria without having seen Umbrian painting. And similarly, it is difficult to approach Umbrian painting without ever having been to the region: there are perhaps few areas in Italy where the relationship between the inhabitants and their heritage is so close, intense, visceral. Works by anonymous masters dot the entire territory, hide inside small churches lost in the fields, populate museums that probably had never been heard of, show themselves behind the doors of a stately palace, and many others are housed in the laboratories of the superintendence or in the deposit of Santo Chiodo in Spoleto, the one that houses the works recovered from the buildings collapsed after the 2016 earthquake. A repository that willingly opens its doors to residents who want to see their works, because they can’t be without them-they are indispensable landmarks for communities in the area.

Carlo Gamba, in one of his essays on the painting of the Umbrian Raphael (but the discourse may well apply to Umbrian painting of all times), said that Umbrian art proceeds from those landscapes that Carducci sang about in the Fonti del Clitunno, under the clouds that smoke over the Apennines, in the shade of the ash forests that cover the hills, among the “fields of human labor,” following the course of the sacred Tiber: in this region there is no solution of continuity between art and nature, and certain paintings, if they may seem “unbearable in series in a gallery,” on the contrary “appear delightful and moving in a country church,” Gamba said. It is a painting “tuned in green and blue,” reflecting the beauty, tranquility, and serenity of Umbria, and “concurring to inspire feelings of serene contemplative mysticism.” And it is then a substantially anonymous painting, especially if one thinks of that of medieval Umbria, and even more specifically of that which developed to the left of the Tiber, wanting to use Giovanni Previtali’s demarcation: a propulsive role was that of the city of Spoleto where, Andrea de Marchi wrote, a “host of painters and sculptors took root, perhaps indeed of painter-sculptors” who played a leading role in “forging a wholly distinctive artistic landscape, connoted also by very specific types in the structure of the artifacts, in the orchestration of pictorial cycles, individual votive images, painted crosses and wooden crucifixes, mixed tabernacles of carving for the iconic center and painting for the narrative wings.”

And not even Spoleto, in the early fourteenth century, could avoid comparison with what was being produced in the Assisian workshops: Giotto was a sort of watershed, to which all Umbrian painting responded, either by adapting to the new language, interpreting it and adapting it to the sensibility proper to this land, or by responding to Giotto’s complex scenes with an art that was now minimal, now sign-like and gestural, now filled with almost expressionistic accents.

Spoletino was also the Master of Fossa, a pupil of another anonymous great, the Master of the Cross of Trevi (at the time there was no signature: the individuality of the artist was in strong subordination to the result), as well as an artist who can be placed at the most recent chronological extreme of the painters who wanted to measure themselves against the paintings of Assisi: the so-called name-piece, i.e., the work that conventionally gave him his name, is an elegant Madonna and Child carved in wood, set in a painted tabernacle, and from the Abbey of Fossa in Abruzzo (now in the National Museum in L’Aquila). It was Roberto Longhi, during his university course on 14th-century Umbrian painting in the 1953-1954 academic year, who first identified the personality of the Master of Fossa, who was active between Umbria and Abruzzo as a sculptor and as a painter. The artist was then studied at length by many other scholars, was recognized as one of the major leaders of the 14th-century Spoleto (“the most important and beautiful painter of the 14th century in Spoleto”, defined him as Alessandro Delpriori on the occasion of the major exhibition on masterpieces of the Umbrian 14th century held in 2018), and among the works attributed to him is a large fresco from the Convent of Santa Croce in Trevi, now preserved in the local Museum of San Francesco: it is a striking Crucifixion with, on either side, a Madonna and Child Enthroned and anAnnunciation.

Maestro di Fossa, Crucifixion, Annunciation and Madonna and Child En throned (c. 1330-1333; detached fresco, 350 x 475 cm; Trevi, Raccolta dArte di San Francesco)

It is a work that has suffered the ravages of time, and is therefore in a rather precarious state of legibility: the surface is compromised by scratches, abrasions, color falls, and lacunae, so much so that as early as 1872 the work was described as “reduced due to poor restoration” by the painter Mariano Guardabassi. The fresco was then torn down in the 1960s to be first placed in the Church of Our Lady of Tears and then, since 1996, in the museum. However, the work is not so badly reduced as to prevent the greatness of the Maestro di Fossa, recognized as the author of the Crucifixion and the two side scenes by Corrado Fratini in 1986, from shining through.

The crucified Christ is in the center, and at his side appear the four angels who, in keeping with the usual iconography, rush in with cups to collect the blood gushing from his wounds. Below, to the left of Christ, are the figures of St. John and Mary Magdalene, while on the opposite side the Virgin is fainting and being assisted by the other two Marys. The other two scenes, those with the Madonna and Child Enthroned and theAnnunciation, are placed on the left and right sides, respectively. This is the simple, almost schematic arrangement of the figures in the composition of the Master of Fossa, who in laying out his scene does not stray very far from the Crucifixion painted by Giotto and collaborators in the Lower Basilica of Assisi (but even more Giottesque, if anything, is the scene of theAnnunciation, which takes place under a house that recalls Giotto’s structures of the Franciscan frescoes): so much so that until the 1940s it was believed to be a work of the Giotto school. And for the knowledge of the time it was understandable, but as studies progressed one could not fail to appreciate the singularity of the author’s temperament.

The Master of Fossa is a delicate painter, perhaps the most international of the Spoleto painters (another of the masterpieces assigned to him, the Madonna and Child in Spoleto Cathedral, reveals all the affinities with French sculpture of the time), he is an artist who seems to translate onto the gentle faces of his figures the beauty of the Umbrian landscape and the spirituality of a land where, between the Two and Fourteenth centuries, some of the most active religious movements of the time arose. The Gothic preciosity of the Maestro di Fossa denotes his knowledge of Simone Martini, while the softness of the faces links him to Puccio Capanna: both painters whom the Maestro had been able to appreciate precisely in Assisi. And certain traits are typical of the personality of the Maestro di Fossa: the slightly elongated faces with eyebrows describing almost perfect arcs, the vividness of expressions, the slightly almond-shaped eyes, the light chiaroscuro transitions, figures suave and always characterized by a certain degree of ethereal purity. There is then an extraordinary sweetness in certain very human passages, such as the hand of the Mary in the golden tunic caressing the face of a Virgin who cannot bear the sight of her son on the cross, and the hand of the other holding the Madonna by one shoulder: it is perhaps one of the most touching moments in all fourteenth-century Umbrian painting.

The Master of Fossa is, as we anticipate, also the last great painter of the fourteenth-century school of Spoleto, probably because he worked in the years when work was being completed in Assisi and the cycles that artists could admire a little further north had already begun to lose their propulsive force. However, the strength of an art that is tied to its territory with strong, indissoluble bonds would not have been lost.

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