The Cressac Frescoes
The clearest case sits in a small chapel commanderie at Cressac sur Charente, near Blanzac in France. Painted around 1170 to 1200 for the Templars' own house, the walls once carried a full cycle of campaign scenes. One surviving register shows mounted knights in white mantles and chain mail charging with couched lances against fleeing Saracen horsemen, while a fortified town watches from the background [1]. Because the chapel belonged to the Order itself, this is not an outsider's impression. It is closer to a chevalier's own memory of war in Outremer, painted onto the walls he prayed within. Even here caution is needed: revisiting the site decades after his own foundational study, Curzi warns that Cressac, Montsaunès, and San Bevignate remain the only three cycles substantial enough to support any claim about a shared Templar workshop practice or style, and that the temptation to read a single "Templar manner" across them should be resisted [2].
San Bevignate in Perugia
A second, equally genuine case survives in Umbria. The church of San Bevignate, raised for the Templars from 1256 and decorated across the 1260s and 1280s, still bears a damaged frieze of a pitched battle between Templars and a Saracen army, possibly the encounter at Nablus in 1242 [3]. One better preserved fragment shows two mounted brothers, the foremost bearded and helmeted, his shield and helm both carrying the Order's cross beside the black and white baucent, the Templars' own battle standard. Thermographic survey of the building in recent years has confirmed both the dating and the condition of the plaster beneath these scenes [4].
The Grand Master's Seal
Where the frescoes show how the Templars pictured their wars, the Order's official seal shows how they pictured themselves. Attested from 1158 under Bertrand de Blanquefort and used until the suppression in 1312, the great seal carried two riders sharing a single horse on one face, and the Dome of the Rock, remembered as the *Templum Domini*, on the other. Popular legend read the shared mount as a sign of holy poverty, though the Rule permitted each knight three horses, so the true meaning likely lay closer to fraternity and shared purpose than to want.
An Outsider's Eye: Matthew Paris
The fourth witness stands apart from the rest, since it comes not from the Order but from an English Benedictine at St Albans. Matthew Paris, working on his Chronica Majora around 1240 to 1253, sketched Templars in the margins of his chronicle. Among them two brothers again sharing a single mount, echoing the seal he must have seen on a passing charter. His drawings are not devotional or self representing. They are the record of a chronicler who watched Templars pass through England and wanted his readers to recognise them.
The fourth witness stands apart from the rest, since it comes not from the Order but from an English Benedictine at St Albans. Matthew Paris, working on his *Chronica Majora* around 1240 to 1253, sketched Templars in the margins of his chronicle, among them two brothers again sharing a single mount, echoing the seal he must have seen on a passing charter. His drawings are not devotional or self representing; they are the record of a chronicler who watched Templars pass through England and wanted his readers to recognise them.
Together these four sources, two painted by the Order for itself, one struck as its own emblem, and one sketched by a watching outsider, form the small surviving core of genuinely near contemporary Templar imagery. Everything painted, engraved or filmed since has been working from this same thin evidence, whether it says so or not.
This blog is original work by TemplarsNow based on an AI-assisted quick scan on the topic. References and further reading, all links verified July 17, 2026 but papers not always studied in detail: [1] Luchitskaya, Svetlana I. "The Iconography of the Crusades." In Images in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Approaches in Russian Historical Research, edited by Gerhard Jaritz, translated by Elena Lemeneva. Medium Aevum Quotidianum, Sonderband XIII. Krems: Medium Aevum Quotidianum, Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der materiellen Kultur des Mittelalters, 2003; [2] Curzi, Gaetano. "I Templari e la pittura monumentale: vecchi problemi e nuove considerazioni" In Milites Templi: Il patrimonio monumentale e artistico dei Templari in Europa, edited by Sonia Merli, 299.328. Perugia: Volumnia, 2008; [3] Curzi, Gaetano. "I Templari, committenza artistica e culti di un ordine internazionale: il caso di San Bevignate a Perugia. In *Medioevo europeo e mediterraneo: Scambi, circolazione e mobilità artistica*, edited by Roberta Cerone and Manuela Gianandrea. Rome: Campisano Editore, 2024; [4] Gusella, Vittorio, Federico Cluni, and Roberto Liberotti. "Feasibility of a Thermography Nondestructive Technique for Determining the Quality of Historical Frescoed Masonries: Applications on the Templar Church of San Bevignate." Applied Sciences 11, no. 1 (2021), article 281. The illustration shows the central portion of the "battle fresco" in San Bevignate, Perugia. The fresco survives only in fragments. It shows a battle between Templars and Saracens, tentatively identified as the sack of Nablus of 1242. This central portion of the fresco shows two mounted Kinghts Templar. The upper body and bearded face of the left one has been preserved, showing him armed with a heater shield, with the Templar emblem both on his helmet and his shield. Behind him follows another mounted Templar wielding the Baucent war flag. By Unknown author - San Bevignate, Perugia, counter-facade source Wikimedia, Public Domain,.
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