Andrea di Bonaiuto

Walk into the chapter house of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, the room later called the Spanish Chapel, and the walls close around you with painting on every side. Andrea di Bonaiuto covered them between 1365 and 1367, and the whole cycle was built to glorify the Dominicans, the preaching order that ran the church.

On one wall Saint Thomas Aquinas, the order's great theologian, sits enthroned above the figures of the sciences, with the defeated heretics beneath him. On another, the Church guards its flock with a pack of black-and-white hunting dogs driving off the wolves. The dogs are a pun the friars enjoyed: Domini canes, the hounds of the Lord, for the Dominicans.

In that same scene Andrea painted Florence cathedral crowned by a great dome, pink and complete. When he worked, that dome did not exist. The cathedral still stood unfinished, and no one yet knew how to close so wide a span. Brunelleschi, the architect who solved it, would not raise the real dome until the 1420s, more than 50 years later.