Dormitio Virginis

Master of Beffi (Leonardo di Sabino da Teramo?)

The panel depicts the moment of the transportation of the Virgin’s body to the Valley of Josaphat. The Madonna, lying on a marble sarcophagus, is surrounded by nine apostles led by St. John the Evangelist, who holds in his hand the palm of Paradise given to him, according to the Legenda Aurea by Jacopo da Varazze, by the Virgin herself shortly before her passing. Although the conservation history of the work is unknown, recent restorations have shown that at an unspecified time, the panel was dismantled and subsequently reassembled; this caused the loss of some of the construction boards in which the missing figures of the apostles were evidently to be depicted, while two of them – those we see today in a more yellowish colour – were redone around the nineteenth century.
Behind them, three angels hold the instruments needed for the funeral celebrations: the incense boat, the thurible and the bucket for the holy water. In the background, on the right, the figure of Christ stands in the starry sky holding the animula (soul) of the Virgin intent on showing her girdle to St. Thomas. Some saints belonging to the Franciscan order are kneeling beside the Virgin’s coffin: Francis, a saint wrapped in a pink cloak with fur decorations identified as Elizabeth, Anthony of Padua and Louis of Toulouse.
Two particular episodes taken from apocryphal writings are depicted in the foreground. The first, on the left, shows the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God by Saint John the Evangelist, in which it is narrated how the Archangel Michael punished the Jew Gefonia with the cutting off of his hands after he dared to throw Mary’s coffin to the ground during the funerary transport. On the right, instead, the episode from the Legenda Aurea in which the Jew Ruben’s hands dry up after committing the same misdeed as Gefonia is depicted. This type of iconography is not unusual for our master, so much so that he also reproduces it in the right-hand flap of the homonymous Triptych kept in the museum rooms.

There is no information about the work’s original location or who commissioned it, but it has been suggested that the saint portrayed on the far left of the panel, dressed in a blue cloak decorated with an ermine fur collar and red headgear, can be identified with Saint Ivo of Kermartin, protector of lawmen. According to this identification, it was assumed that the work might have come from the church of San Francesco in Teramo and that its patron might have been Bernardo di Tommaso da Melatino, a member of one of the most important families of the Teramo area who held numerous political offices also outside the city and whose own palace stood right next to the church.
The peculiar shape of the panel, long and narrow, has always led critics to assume that the work served as an altar antependium. During the recent restoration, however, numerous structural novelties emerged that led to the assumption that the work also had a predella and perhaps even an upper register.