Lorenzo Riccardi (“La Sapienza” University, Rome)
Panel painting between the 13th and 14th century in southern Lazio:Two “forgotten” works in Amaseno
Amaseno, a small center in southern Lazio, now in the province of Frosinone, is a treasure chest of medieval gems that have yet to be studied. Among them are two works I would like to introduce, which unfortunately, due to poor conservation, have remained on the periphery of Italian panel painting1. The first work was preserved in the Collegiate Church of S. Maria Assunta, a Cistercian building consecrated in 1179. The painting was a triptych (fig. 1) in which the Virgin and Child were shown enthroned in the central panel, St. Ambrose on the left panel and St. Nicholas on the right. The second work is now kept in the “Laboratori di restauro” of the “Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini”, but it originally came from the “Santuario di Santa Maria del Perpetuo Soccorso.” The Santuario is best known as “Auricola”, a thirteenth-century monastery, of uncertain Benedictine origin, that preserved some Cistercian forms before its reconstruction in 1892. The area of this painting is divided into three parts (fig. 2): in the center there is the enthroned Virgin shown nursing Christ, two female saints on either side, the Annunciation of Mary in the upper left and the Nativity of Christ in the upper right.
