The monochrome Passion Cycle of San Nicolò del Boschetto is a mysterious group of fourteen large painted cloths representing a unique survival of their type. The cloths depict the passion of Christ from Gethsemane to the crucifixion, descent and entombment, and were intended to line a space within a church, creating a kind of temporary, painted chapel. The space they enclosed formed a sepulchre for the reserved host, the body of Christ, where it could be contemplated and adored during the period between Maundy Thursday night and Easter Sunday morning. This essay, however, does not focus on the paintings as representative of the Easter sepulchre tradition but rather considers their temporal function within Cassinese Benedictine soteriology. The cycle reconstructs linear narrative, taking the stories of Peter's and Judas’ true and false repentance out of sequence and folding them into the start of the narrative. Consequently, just as the paintings locate the viewer in a physical space designed for a peculiar, paused present, the aliturgical moment of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, so they also encourage and enable the viewer to contemplate and inhabit both past and future: looking back to sins committed and forward to restored spiritual health.

There is no documentary record of the cycle's commission or early history, or of its precise mode of display. Constructed from strips of linen, approximately 92cm wide and sewn together vertically, the cloths are very large, the biggest measuring over 4.5 metres in height and width. Their physical presence is made more extraordinary by their media, painted on unstretched indigo-dyed cloth entirely in lead white, with a brushed black medium used to sketch out some forms. Although the indigo of the linen would have been far deeper and richer at the time of their production, and its juxtaposition with the lead white commensurately sharper, the paintings remain at once ghostly and altogether corporeal, combining an ethereal insubstantiality with a solidly marmoreal quality like that of relief sculpture.

There are fourteen cloths, of which eight contain Passion narratives. The compositions of four of the narrative cloths follow closely, but not precisely, models from the Engraved Passion, Large Woodcut Passion and Small Woodcut Passion of Albrecht Durer.