Coronation of the Virgin with Angels and Saints

Count the saints in this altarpiece and you reach 56. They fill the four side panels in stacked rows, halo overlapping halo, while in the centre Christ sets a crown on his mother's head and angels kneel below. Bernardo Daddi painted it between about 1340 and 1345, probably for an altar on the screen that once divided Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican church of Florence, into a choir for the friars and a space for lay people. That altar was dedicated to Saint Peter Martyr, a Dominican preacher murdered in 1252, which explains the friar in his order's black mantle in the front row on the Virgin's right. The screen came down in the 1560s. From Giotto's Baroncelli altarpiece in Santa Croce, Daddi borrowed the idea of letting a crowd run on behind the frame, so each pair of side panels reads as one gathering.