Master of the Cross 434

This painter has the barest name in the whole gallery, not a place and not a patron, just a number. Cross 434 is the inventory tag of a large painted crucifix in the Uffizi, and the man who made it around 1240 is called, for want of anything better, the Master of the Cross 434.

The cross itself is a storyteller's work. Down each side of Christ's body run small scenes of the Passion, and the painter picks them out with sharp light and shadow to give the figures a weight unusual for Tuscan painting this early. Some scholars think he may be the same hand as the young Coppo di Marcovaldo, one of the few thirteenth-century Florentines whose name we actually know. Others keep him apart.

The crucifix is thought to have been painted for a convent somewhere between Florence and Pisa, which is roughly all we can say about where he worked.