Master of the Magdalen

The panel that names this painter shows Mary Magdalene standing full-length, wrapped in nothing but her own long hair, with eight small scenes from her life set around her, from the dinner where she washed Christ's feet to her last communion in the desert. It hangs in the Accademia in Florence and dates to about 1280.

The artist is anonymous. His group of paintings was pieced together around 1900 by the Swedish scholar Osvald Sirén, who gathered panels sharing a single hand and named the whole body of work after this Magdalene. He was Florentine, active roughly from 1265 to 1290, at the moment the city's painting was loosening, moving away from the rigid Byzantine manner of Coppo di Marcovaldo toward the softer, more lifelike faces of Cimabue.

Beyond the Accademia Magdalene, panels given to him hang in Florence, New York and Madrid, all recognised by the same hand Sirén first traced.