Nativity of Christ

The Uffizi is a Florentine collection, and its walls tell mostly a Florentine story, which makes this small panel unusual. It is the only fourteenth-century painting from Bologna in the whole gallery. It was made around 1380 by a Bolognese master who signed himself simply Simon. The name we use for him now, Simone dei Crocifissi, Simone of the Crucifixes, was attached to him almost three centuries later, in the 1600s, because he had painted so many images of Christ on the cross. Here he is at the other end of that story, the birth. Mary kneels before the child on a ground of gold, in the flat, glowing manner of Bolognese painting from before perspective arrived from Florence. Some 70 of his works still survive today.