Agnolo Gaddi

Walk into the tall choir chapel behind the high altar of Santa Croce in Florence and you are surrounded by eight scenes tracing the wood of Christ's cross, from a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to a Byzantine emperor carrying the relic back into Jerusalem. Agnolo Gaddi painted them in the 1380s, and it is the earliest surviving monumental telling of that whole legend in Italy.

Agnolo came from a painting dynasty. His father, Taddeo Gaddi, had been the closest pupil of Giotto, the master who pulled Italian painting toward weight and real space, and Agnolo grew up as the last important heir of that line. His figures are softer and more decorative than Giotto's, dressed in the shot colours and gold that Florentine patrons wanted at the end of the 14th century.

What outlived his frescoes was his workshop. One of his assistants, Cennino Cennini, later wrote 'Il Libro dell'Arte', a handbook explaining exactly how the Gaddi shop ground its pigments, laid gold, and worked wet plaster. It is the reason we still know how a Florentine painter of his generation actually worked. In the last scene of the cross legend Agnolo left a small portrait of himself among the crowd.