Lamentation over the dead Christ

This panel came from San Remigio, a small church in Florence that once looked after French pilgrims heading to Rome, and it is the one work that lets us see clearly what Giottino could do. He was working around the 1360s, a generation after Giotto, and while he kept the gold ground of his time he softened everything else. The mourning is quiet and physical. Mary cradles the dead Christ, two women bend to kiss his hands, and the grief passes from face to face rather than being announced by gesture. Look to the lower corners and you find the people who paid for the painting, a kneeling woman and a girl presented by a monk and a bishop, shown at prayer inside the holy scene as if they had stepped into it. Bringing living donors into the sacred story this tenderly was still unusual. Very little else survives that is securely his, and the Uffizi bought this panel in 1842.