Pacino di Buonaguida
1280–1340 · Italian · Florentine Gothic, Gothic
The story
In the Florence of the early 1300s, Giotto was changing what painting could do, giving figures weight and space as if you could walk around them. Pacino di Buonaguida worked in the same city at the same time, and he is the first Florentine manuscript illuminator whose name we actually know.
He took Giotto's new sense of solid bodies and carried it into small, jewel-bright pictures, panels and the painted pages of choir books, keeping a storyteller's love of incident and gold. Scholars now group more than 50 works around his hand, though only one, an altarpiece in the Accademia, carries his signature.
His most ambitious surviving work is also in the Accademia in Florence: a large Tree of Life, painted around 1310. It sets the crucified Christ at the centre of a literal tree whose branches carry dozens of small scenes from scripture, an image built directly from a devotional text by the Franciscan writer Bonaventure. You read it like a diagram, climbing branch by branch.
