Pacino di Bonaguida, a painter and illuminator, was active in Florence in the first half of the 14th century. His name appears in a document dated 20 February 1303 that records the end of his partnership with Tambo di Serraglio, a painter about whom we know nothing more, and then - in around 1330 - in the enrolment books of the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries, to which painters belonged.¹The starting point for the reconstruction of his artistic career is the polyptych with the Crucifixion and Sts Nicholas, Bartholomew, Florentius and Luke (Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia, inv. no. 8568, coming from the San Firenze church in Florence), which bears an inscription with his name next to that of the patron and a sadly fragmentary date - Symon [p]r[es]b[i]ter s[ancti] Flor[enti] fec[it] pi[n]gi h[oc] op[us] a Pacino Bonaguide an[no] D[omi]ni MCCCX[…] - which most believe must have meant 1320. Pacino’s fame is linked to his work as an illuminator, an activity in which he was often assisted by the Master of the Dominican Effigies, an anonymous artist, perhaps from a younger generation, with whom he shared a workshop that, in the second quarter of the 14th century, had something of a monopoly over book decoration in Florence, boosted by important projects such as the illustrated commentary on the Divine Comedy (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Pal. 313), the New Chronicles by Giovanni Villani (Vatican City, Chig. L VIII 296) and the Regia Carmina by Convenevole da Prato (London, British Library, Royal 6 E IX). In panel painting, his storytelling gifts are apparent in the variety and originality of the devotional themes to which he gives voice, from the Lignum vitae by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio to the story of the Blessed Chiarito del Vaglia, but he also showed a capacity for embracing more recent trends in contemporary figurative culture in a carefully measured way.²The work in question, as indicated by the horizontal veins of the wood, is the fragment of a predella and depicts the miraculous mass of St Proculus, bishop of Narni (fig. 1). There are various different versions of this story. The one illustrated here shows St Proculus having a vision of an angel as he celebrates mass. After taking the chalice from his hands and taking it up to heaven, the angel returns it to him full of Christ’s blood. The chalice has since been lost, but we can glimpse a fragment of it amidst the folds of the drape held by the angel.³ On the right, a group of believers attends the event in amazement. We know of another five sections from the same predella: St Proculus Ordering a Doe to Stop and St Proculus Taking Milk for His Thirsty Companions (Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, inv. nos. 1943.110, 1943.111), the Martyrdom of St Proculus (private collection), the Beheading of St Proculus (formerly in Siena, Piccolomini-Bandini Collection) and the Resurrection of a Dead Boy Placed Beneath the Tomb of St Proculus (Newark, Del., Alana Collection, fig. 2).⁴ 

The life of St Proculus is a very rare tale, which is not included in the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Varagine, the main hagiographic source from the late 13th century onwards. The presence of a church named after this saint in Florence is linked to the fact that he was the patron saint of the monks at the nearby abbey of Santa Maria Assunta, who were devoted to him. Indeed, the monastery of the Bolognese Benedictines was named after St Proculus and the order worked hard to promote his worship, not just within the city but within the congregation as a whole. However, medieval devotion and the resulting hagiographic literature featured a number of saints with this name, who are often mistaken for one another. Two martyrs were venerated together in Bologna, one of whom was a bishop; there was also a bishop from Narni, another from Verona and yet another from Ravenna. The legends of two of them - the bishop from Narni and the martyr who died in Bologna - merged to form a new account in the 12th century, the memory of which is preserved in the Legendarium by the Dominican monk Pietro Calò. This is the source of the episodes illustrated in the predella of the polyptych by Pacino di Bonaguida. The section in the Cerruti Collection and the two now in Cambridge refer to events from the life of the bishop of Narni, described in the Leggenda dei XII Siri (BHL, I, pp. 245-246, no. 1620; II, pp. 1012-1013, nos. 6955-6957; Lucchesi, Procolo, vescovo di Narni, in Bibliotheca Sanctorum, X, Rome 1968, fols. 1155-1157; G. S. Saiani, “La ‘Passio XII fratrum qui e Syria venerunt’. Studio, esame della tradizione manoscritta, edizione critica”, PhD thesis, Università degli Studi di Trento, academic year 2015- 16, pp. 40, 43, 56-58). According to the latter, Proculus arrived in Rome from Syria during the reign of Emperor Justinian (518-527), but due to the persecutions inflicted upon Christians he fled to Narni, where the miracle took place that is illustrated in the section in question here, as already described, and the one narrated in the panels now in Cambridge, split into two episodes. In the first of the two sections (inv. no. 1943.110), Proculus causes a doe to appear during the journey to Rome with the envoys of Pope Eugene, who did not believe in his miracles and challenged him to summon one. In the second (inv. no. 1943.111) the saint is milking the doe to quench the thirst of his travel companions, who had previously refused to receive communion from him. The reference to the Syrian legend and the story of the bishop of Narni ends here. However, Pietro Calò’s story continues by drawing upon the hagiography of the saint who died a martyr in Bologna (BHL 6957 and Acta Sanctorum Iunii ex Latinis et Graecis aliarumque gentium antiquis Monumentis servata primigenia Scriptarum phrasi, collecta, digesta…, tomus I, Antverpiae 1695, pp. 50-51, 79-82). In order to escape persecution, Proculus fled to Bologna, where he was captured by Totila, king of the Ostrogoths, who tortured him, having two strips of skin removed from his back, as we can see in one of the sections of Pacino’s predella (its position is unknown), before having him beheaded as we see in the next section. The passion for the Bolognese saint is also behind the post-mortem episode that Pacino depicted in the section on the far right of the predella (now Newark, DE, Alana Collection), where a young boy is restored to life after being buried beneath the saint’s tomb. Following these events, the tomb of Proculus is said to have been opened and his body discovered intact, without any sign of the decapitation he had undergone. The small panels, originally painted on a single axis, are identifiable as the “stories from the life of St Proculus believed to be the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Siena”, recorded by Father Giuseppe Richa as parts of the polyptych formerly on the main altar in the church of San Procolo in Florence, of which we also know the sections with Sts Nicholas, John the Evangelist and Proculus now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, while the central Madonna and Child and a St John the Baptist, also mentioned in historical sources, have since been lost.⁵The inclusion of St Nicholas on the Virgin’s right, in a position of honour that is seemingly out of place with the dedication of the church, commemorates an ancient hospital dedicated to the saint, adjacent to the church of San Procolo and demolished in 1214. Sources tell us that the materials resulting from the demolition were used to extend the church.⁶ Vincenzo Borghini was still able to see the work in its original location,⁷but by Richa’s time the main sections were conserved in the sacristy and the stories in a “gallery” next to the rector’s apartment. On the basis of the detailed description given by the scholar, in order to complete the reconstruction of the predella we can see that we are still missing a section with the Miracle of the Healed Hand, which must have followed the two sections with the story of the doe, while our panel opened the narrative sequence. The old theory that the main tier was made up of seven rather than five sections is contradicted by various elements, not least the dimensions.⁸Counting just five sections, the principal tier reaches a width of at least 250 centimetres, which would exceed three metres if a further two elements were included. There are no examples of this size and type - a heptaptych - in Florentine art from the era. It therefore seems likely that the seven scenes in the predella were not centralised with respect to the sections in the top tier, but that they followed on from one another, separated by decorative strips, as in the predellas by Bernardo Daddi for the Assumption in the cathedral in Prato and for the St Reparata polyptych in Florence. The St Proculus predella is probably one of the oldest Florentine predellas still in existence today, together with the predella with the stories of St Cecilia by Bernardo Daddi, datable to 1326.⁹ For reasons of style, a similar date can also be ascribed to the polyptych by Pacino that should post-date the one of the church of San Firenze, datable to 1320 as we have seen, because it shows a more mature knowledge of the sculptural geometry of Giotto’s style.

[Sonia Chiodo]

1 Milanesi 1893, pp. 17-18. 

2 For a recent reconsideration of this artist’s work, see the exhibition catalogue for Los Angeles-Toronto 2012-13. 

3 On the tradition of the legend of St Proculus, see Melloni 1773, pp. 25-32, which includes a detailed description of the miracles attributed to the saint. See also Lucchesi 1968, cols. 1155-58. 

4 Offner 1930, pp. 101-107; Id. 1956, pp. 153-160. 

5 Richa 1754-62, vol I, t. I, pp. 239, 242-243. For the sections in the principal tier, see I. Tronconi, in Boskovits, Tartuferi 2003, pp. 210-216. 

6 In the light of these circumstances, we can also justify the devotion to the bishop of Myra revealed by the works produced for the church by Ambrogio Lorenzetti; see G. Amato, in Siena 2017, pp. 174-181. 

7 Borghini 1584, pp. 296-297; Richa 1754-62, pp. 239, 242-243. 

8 Offner 1956, pp. 153-154. 

9 C. Strehlke, in Prato 2017, pp. 134-135.