Crucifixion

Around 1400 Florence was full of workshops keeping alive the manner of Giotto, dead by then some 60 years, and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini was one of the busiest painters among them. This crowded Crucifixion was made not for a church but for private prayer in someone's home. Christ hangs between the grieving Virgin and Saint John, and around the cross small angels swoop in to catch the blood streaming from his wounds in cups, a vivid, almost desperate detail meant to hold the viewer on his suffering. The dark background you see now is later overpaint. Beneath it the panel would once have glowed with the gold ground that was standard for its time.