Donatus of Fossombrone

About Donatus of Fossombrone

Donatus of Fossombrone is known through the local devotion to a group called the Five Martyrs, rather than through a reliable individual life. The municipality describes a seventeenth-century altarpiece commissioned for San Filippo in which Aquilino, Gemino, Gelasio, Magno and Donato present a model of the church to Mary.

An Italian church heritage inventory also associates relics of Donato and the other named martyrs with San Filippo. Those records establish the city’s reception of the group; they do not by themselves establish that its five names once belonged to one historical martyrdom at Fossombrone.

Critical martyrological scholarship describes the group as assembled from separate names and questions its attachment to Fossombrone. The name also occurs as Donata in the critical discussion, leaving the identity and even the sex of this supposed individual unsettled. For that reason no personal life dates, death scene, or individual portrait can responsibly be supplied.