Our Lady of Simon of the Crucifixes and a flight of fancy between the pages of Marco Santagata

The frescoes around which the entire story of the novel that won Marco Santagata the Campiello Prize in 2003, Il maestro dei santi pallidi, really exist. They decorate two small mountain churches in the Apennines of Modena: the figures in the oratory of Saints Fabian and Sebastian in the village of Riva are, in fiction, the first that little Cinìn sees in his life and which, from the first encounter, inflame him with a love of painting. The frescoes in the little church in Monteforte, on the other hand, are the ones that Cinìn will paint toward the end of the tale, after encountering a series of fortuitous circumstances that will transform the poor cow guardian into a recognized and passionate master. They are modest cycles by unknown hands, the works of two distinct painters who worked in the mid-15th century, sticking to a markedly vernacular language, by mountain painters still bound to archaic modes, essentially excluded from what was happening in the same turn of years in the cities of the plains, or at most only able to perceive a dim and muffled echo of it. We do not know the names of the master of the Riva and the master of Monteforte: it is Marco Santagata who has invented a story for them, sketching the personalities of Giberto della Porretta and his pupil, the poor Cinìn, who will become the esteemed master Gennaro and who, following d’a long sequence of picaresque novel-like traverses, will find the first important occasion of his career in the fresco decoration of the tiny oratory of Monteforte, commissioned by the Countess of Renno.

But before entering Master Giberto’s workshop, young Cinìn had joined the countess’s servants. And he had fallen in love with her: and for him, who in the meantime had taken to practicing drawing by replicating the figures of the church of Renno everywhere, with charcoal, on whatever stone came within his reach, the countess had become a kind of monomaniacal fixation. “He stopped copying saints and animals, and on every surface he could find he began to draw with obsessive fury the image of the Madonna: the oval face, large eyes, straight nose and a black dot in the middle of the forehead.” For much of the novel, the only drawing that Cinìn traces on the stones is the face of the Madonna, which takes the form of the noble and delicate profile of the blond countess.

Wanting to get a flight of fancy off the ground, one might think of giving real likenesses to the countess, finding her counterpart in some Madonna of Cinìn’s time. And there are several one could embark on this flight: one could choose, for example, one of the many painted by Simone dei Crocifissi. Like the splendid and elegant one preserved at the Galleria Estense in Modena: the one holding in her hands a mischievous baby Jesus, who looks at his mother with a complicit gaze as she flinches while touching the face of one of the angels.

Simone dei Crocifissi, Madonna and Child Enthroned among Angels (c. 1390-1399; tempera on panel, 96 x 59; Modena, Galleria Estense)

It is true: it is a work that predates the story told by Santagata by about fifty years, and Simone, unlike Cinìn, is a city painter, who therefore lives in a totally different world than the novel’s protagonist. But Simone of the Crucifixes has something to share with Cinìn “of the pale saints.” his origins that were anything but lofty (for Francesco Arcangeli, Simone was “the rustic son of the shoemaker Filippo”), his prolificity, his curiosity, his approximation to the manners of coeval Tuscan painters, and even the composition of his clientele, since Santagata’s Cinìn worked both for the little churches of the countryside and for the gentlemen who bathed in the summer at the spas of Porretta. Besides, the “master of the pale saints” had his trade in Bologna: we like to think, therefore, that on his way to the city he might have seen something of Simone.

The Modena panel belongs to the last phase of Simone’s production, the most serial and perhaps taken for granted, but also the most fortunate, since he had become one of the most in-demand painters in Bologna and had managed to set up a workshop that fired works all the time: and for this reason Simone was, in all probability, the most productive painter of the entire fourteenth-century Bologna. Nevertheless, he was still able to express a painting that could achieve qualitative achievements that rise above the production of the same period, of the 1490s: and this panel has always been recognized as being of greater quality and finesse than the other works he was executing at the same time. It is also signed: at the base of the throne we read there, in tiny Gothic letters, “Simon fecit hoc opus,” a formula that the Bolognese painter used several times. For Daniele Benati, the continuous recourse to the signature is a symptom of a "surplus of self-promotional intelligence“ (so he writes in the introduction to the first monograph on Simon, by Gianluca Del Monaco published in 2018), and the artist affixes his name to works of various endeavors, but always aiming ”to emphasize his own claimed excellence.“ For the scholar, such frequent naming is also the basis of his nickname ”of the Crucified,“ which was ”affixed“ to him (so Benati himself) in the age of the Counter-Reformation, and which still distinguishes him. Even Simone, Del Monaco points out, went so far as to sign even workshop works with a less than happy outcome, with the aim of ”meeting the demands of the market."

In the Estense Gallery panel, Simone does not skimp on gold: evidently the work was intended for a patron who could afford not to care about expenses. Gold also abounds on the Virgin’s garments: on the ultramarine robe, on the white mantle elegantly lined with red that, despite the ruin of the pictorial surface, still conveys to us the wisdom of the transitions of light and shadow, and then again on the fine borders, on the drape that the angels raise to cover the back of the throne. The figure of the seated Virgin touches heights of monumentality also typical of the last Simon. But it is a Simone who, despite being able to give us back a Madonna with an aristocratic and almost austere profile, certainly one of the noblest Madonnas of his painting, does not abandon his lively expressiveness, the clearest symptom of his Bolognese training close to Vitale degli Equi. And her Child gazing at his mother, as if satisfied with his prank on the angel, who moreover doesn’t make a peep, draws smiles from anyone who admires this panel. It is a detail that gives the atmosphere that sense of familial intimacy that must not have displeased the commissioner, probably a wealthy bourgeois from Bologna, who by means of the two angels playing a viella and a guitar surely wished to celebrate the happiness of his existence through music as well.

Simone, however, differs from Vitale in the more pronounced and obvious plastic sense that characterizes his figures, including the blond Madonna of the Estense Gallery, with her oval face, large almond-shaped eyes, and straight nose, and with her imposing figure. Just as Santagata’s Cinìn, in the mid-15th century, did not prove insensitive to Masaccio and the Trinity of Santa Maria Novella he encountered during a trip to Florence, so Simone did not remain impervious to Giotto’s lesson, received through the medium of other Felsine artists, though modulated according to his conservative taste. A taste that led him to populate his tables with madonnas that knew how to be as sweet and stately as the one in Modena. At that time, there was no court in Bologna: and yet, perhaps the refinement and affability of certain Bolognese panels, such as Simone’s, could suggest to us and make our imaginations run to those stories of cattlemen who become painters, of feudal disputes between mountain squires, of countesses who appear in the faces of the Virgins, of figures who fascinate the faithful in the country oratories, in two words to that world of almost fairy-tale wonders evoked by the pages of Santagata’s novel.

If you enjoyed this article, read the previous ones in the same series: Gabriele Bella’sConcerto; Plinio Nomellini’sNinfa rossa;Guercino’s lApparizionedi Cristo alla madre; Titian’s Maddalena; Vittorio Zecchin’sMille e una notte; Lorenzo Lotto’sTrasfigurazione; Jacopo Vignali’sTobia e langelo; Luigi Russolo’s Profumo; Antonio Fontanesi’s Novembre; Cosmè Tura’s tondi di san Maurelio.

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