Nardo di Cione

In 1348 the Black Death swept through Florence and killed perhaps half the city. The painting that came after it grew darker and more anxious, and Nardo di Cione worked right in the middle of that shift. Around 1354 he took on the walls of the Strozzi family chapel in Santa Maria Novella, the great Dominican church of Florence, while his older brother Andrea, known as Orcagna, painted the altarpiece that still stands there.

Nardo covered all three walls with a single overwhelming scene of the Last Judgment, Paradise on one side and Hell on the other. For the Hell he did something unusual. He followed the geography of Dante's Inferno closely, laying out its circles and punishments so carefully that a visitor could almost read the poem off the wall. Dante had died only a generation earlier, and here his vision of the afterlife was becoming the shape people pictured when they thought of damnation.

Look behind the altar and Dante himself is there, standing among the saved in the Last Judgment. Nardo died around 1366, and much of what we know of him comes from those frescoes and the tax records he and his brothers left behind in Florence.