SALIMBENE of PARMA. – Chronicler, Franciscan, in Parma in 1221, d. after 8 Sept. 1287.
Son of a Guido de Adam of civic nobility, his vocation, stirred by the environment permeated by the great 13th-century revival of Christian life, by his most religious mother, and by his brother, who preceded him into the Order where he entered in 1238, was bitterly opposed by his father, who tried everything to keep him from it, even appealing to Brother Elias and Emperor Frederick. His life falls into three distinct periods: his travels from city to city, from convent to convent, from Fano, where he hid from his father’s threats, through Lucca, Siena, Pisa, to Parma in 1247, during the siege in which the Empire failed in its last attempt against communal liberties; then a stay in France, probably sent by his fellow citizens for aid, where he saw and knew the protagonists of the great events of the century, and his association, upon his return in 1249, with the Joachimite circles; finally, after 1260, the year of the great Flagellant movement stirred up by Ranieri Fasani, his last years devoted to memory. And if in his youth he ingenuously trusted in that magical number of the time to which certain Joachimite currents reduced the expectation of the third kingdom of the Spirit, now he looks back in amazement at the countless things and people he has seen, and understands that time is providential aid for an unceasing gift of life.
His *Chronica*, the only one of his many works to survive (and incomplete), spans an age of turmoil. He observes and remembers with open eyes and vivid memory, curious about everything because everything is created life. Thus he reveals himself, indirectly but wonderfully, as the fruit of Franciscan spirituality. He moves alongside the great debates agitating contemporary thought and politics, yet never rigidly categorizes the protagonists of that life—popes and emperors, Brother John of Parma and Brother Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, crusader kings and imperial feudatories—into doctrinal or political abstractions; nor does he reduce the anonymous masses of the Alleluia movement, the fighters in the communal wars, the citizens and villagers, to economic or practical categories. The chronicler plunges eagerly into the countless multiplicity of historical life. His gaze captures things in their splendid immediacy without imprisoning them; every creature has the right to life, even those expressed in his affectionate and curious gaze. If the criterion of intellectualist historiography is to understand without love or hatred, the Franciscan enters even the horrific scenes of that tumult with fervent, loving compassion. And his Latin prose, steeped in vernacular forms, is the flexible and powerful instrument of this fervent, naive, and bold style. A monument to 13th-century Italian life, the *Chronica* both reflects and anticipates the new arts, literature, and customs.
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SALIMBENE DA PARMA – SALIMBENI LORENZO AND JACOPO
1668
Information on these two artists, born in Sanseverino (Marche) and active in the first half of the 15th century, is very scarce.
Lorenzo is the elder and, with every likelihood, the more qualified of the two. His name first appears in the triptych of the Pinacoteca of Sanseverino from 1400, in which he declares himself to be 26 years old, placing his birth around 1374. His training is unclear. It is impossible to attribute any influence from Gentile da Fabriano, whose education ran parallel at best, given their ages; nor from Allegretto Nuzi, who, though he may have exerted some influence on him, cannot, for stylistic reasons, have determined his orientation toward the modes of International Gothic, which are already well felt and assimilated in Lorenzo’s earliest work, namely the aforementioned triptych. Thus one must agree with A. Venturi that Lorenzo arrived at these modes through exposure to illuminated manuscripts from the north and, perhaps, through contact with Venetian artists who were frequently encountered in the region at the beginning of the 15th century. In the early years of the 1400s, for example, Jacobello del Fiore stayed in the Marches, and Zanino di Pietro was almost certainly there as well. In 1404, Lorenzo painted frescoes in the church of the Misericordia in Sanseverino, where a figure of Christ, signed and dated, is visible in a sub-arch; in 1407, a *Crucifixion* in the sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo in Diolio.
In the *Stories of St. John the Evangelist*, frescoed in the old cathedral of the city, the two brothers appear for the first time alongside an enigmatic “Master Oliviero.” From this point onward, Lorenzo and Jacopo clearly show a greater orientation toward the modes of International Gothic, with a marked tendency toward narrative gusto, which reappears in the decorations of the crypt of San Lorenzo in Diolio, where, among others, a delicate and most elegant figure of St. Lucy stands out.
The most representative pictorial cycle of the two brothers is undoubtedly the celebrated frescoes in the Oratory of San Giovanni in Urbino, signed and dated 1416. The entire back wall features a large *Crucifixion*, while on the right wall the *Stories of the Baptist* unfold in a series of panels arranged in two tiers. While the *Crucifixion* is marked by a dramatic realism at times exaggerated, the side wall is calm and becomes a pleasant and refined sequence of fantastic stories of the Baptist, in which, alongside the pleasing expressions of naturalistic detail and anecdotal elements typical of International Gothic, there is a tendency toward a decorative refinement achieved with subdued colors of rare preciosity. The artistic unity of this wall is so strong that attempts (by Colasanti and others) to divide the work between the two brothers have been in vain, whereas the stylistic differences with the *Crucifixion* are so notable as to raise the question of another hand (given that the signature and date are found beneath the *Crucifixion*) to which the *Stories* might be attributed. But far more likely, these evident and already noted differences are due to the influence exerted on the painters by the sight of works by northern artists and, probably, by tapestries, to which even the coloristic qualities of these frescoes seem connected (Longhi). The art of the S. brothers is also linked to the frescoes in the Oratory of Santa Monica in Fermo, while other paintings—two saints in the Gallery of Urbino—are attributed to them, though their attribution is far from certain. It seems that Lorenzo had already died before 1420, while Jacopo was still alive in 1427.
See pl. CIV.
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SALIMBENE DA PARMA – *Chronica*. Page covering the years 1168–72. Vatican Library, cod. Vat. lat. 7260, f. 7r (13th c.).