The Death of Saint Martin by Simone Martini

The Death of Saint Martin by Simone Martini (c. 1315–18)

Among ashes

Martin, bishop of Tours, died in November 397 at Candes, a village church he had gone to in order to settle a quarrel among its clergy. His biographer Sulpicius Severus described the death in a letter to his mother-in-law, Bassula. Martin lay in a fever for several days on sackcloth and ashes and refused the straw his disciples offered him. When the priests asked him to turn onto his side and rest, he asked to be left looking towards heaven rather than earth. Those present said that after he died his face looked like an angel's and his limbs were as white as snow.

What Simone painted

Simone left out the ashes. The saint lies stretched along the bottom of the picture in the gold vestments of a bishop, his head in a gold halo, laid on a patterned cloth. Two tonsured clerics, also in gold, bend over him, one at his head and one kneeling behind him.

The rest of the community crowds in behind. On the left a priest in white with a dark stole reads the prayers for the dead from a red book, with a boy beside him holding a vessel. A monk in a brown hooded habit bows with his hands clasped. On the right a tonsured acolyte in white looks upward with his hands joined, and men in red robes stand watching under the arches.

The building is plain and severe, with bare walls, round arches and slender columns, and an open upper storey at the top right. Above the roofline four angels hover against the deep blue, the middle one with its hands joined in prayer.

The Web Gallery of Art's note on the fresco points out that the death and the funeral that follows it are composed alike and share their cast. The priest who reads the rite here reappears at the funeral, and the setting changes from these bare walls to a decorated Gothic chapel.

The chapel

The fresco is one of ten scenes from Martin's life in the chapel of San Martino, the first chapel on the left in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi. The chapel was paid for by Cardinal Gentile Partino da Montefiore, a Franciscan who held the Roman title church of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti. A document of March 1312 records him setting aside 600 gold florins for building and painting it, and he died at Lucca later that year.

The frescoes are unsigned and undated but attributed to Simone Martini. Most scholars now date them between about 1312 and 1318. Simone designed the stained glass first, painted the narrative scenes after returning from Siena in 1315, and finished the saints under the entrance arch after a stay in Naples in 1317. The expulsion of the Guelphs from Assisi in 1319 is usually taken as the latest possible date. Some catalogues put the frescoes in the early 1320s instead.

The death and the funeral are the last two scenes of the cycle and are placed highest on the walls. Another scene in the chapel shows the dream of St Ambrose, who in the legend fell asleep during Mass at the hour of Martin's death. Earlier scenes, lower down, show Martin as a young soldier: sharing his cloak, being knighted, and giving up his weapons.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole fresco, in its near-square format, from the angels above the roof down to the saint's body along the lower edge.

Sources: Wikipedia, "San Martino Chapel" and "Cappella di San Martino (Assisi)" · Web Gallery of Art, "Death of St Martin" · Wikimedia Commons · Sulpicius Severus, Letter 3, to Bassula