Master of Saint Cecilia
Italian
The story
Around the year 1300 someone finished one of the most famous fresco cycles in Italy, and we still don't know who. In the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi, the Legend of Saint Francis runs in scenes along the walls, and most are given to the young Giotto or his circle, while the last three are painted in a different, distinctive hand. That hand is known only as the Master of Saint Cecilia.
The name comes from an altarpiece he made for the church of Santa Cecilia in Florence, showing the saint enthroned with small stories from her life set around her, now one of the treasures of the Uffizi. He worked in Florence in the decades on either side of 1300, close enough to Giotto to share his solid, weighty figures and his boxlike painted architecture, yet plainly his own painter. The Santa Cecilia panel is dated to just after 1304, the year a fire damaged the church it was made for.
