Dante Presenting Giotto to Guido da Ravenna

Giovanni Mochi showed this canvas in 1855, at the Società Promotrice in Florence and again that autumn at the Accademia, where Grand Duke Leopold II awarded him 600 francesconi for it. Reviewers admired what a painter in his twenties had managed and complained that his Giotto looked far too young and the drawing was dry.

The scene comes from a single passage Vasari published in 1568. Dante, exiled in Ravenna, heard that Giotto was in Ferrara, sent for him, and had him fresco stories in the church of San Francesco for Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna who had taken the poet in. No document places Giotto in Ravenna, and no fragment of those frescoes has ever turned up.

Dante died in Ravenna in 1321 and was buried at San Francesco. Since 2021 the painting has been there too, lent by the Florentine galleries to the Dante museum in the old Franciscan convent a few steps from the tomb.