Nicolaus and Johannes
Papal States · Romanesque
The story
Nicolaus and Johannes are known from one work and from nothing else. Their names, the Latin forms of Nicholas and John, appear as the signature on a large Last Judgment painted on wood for the oratory of San Gregorio Nazianzeno, a chapel belonging to a community of nuns in Rome. The panel is now in the Vatican picture gallery.
No document that has come down to us says who they were, whether brothers, master and pupil, or partners sharing a workshop. Even their century was long uncertain. Scholars have dated the panel anywhere from the end of the 11th century to the second half of the 12th, and the Vatican Museums now favour the later date. In Italian the two are called Nicolò and Giovanni.
