Painted Cross

This cross was painted in Florence around 1250, and the museum gives it, with some caution, to the anonymous master named after the cross in the Bigallo. Its images are best followed from top to bottom.

At the top, in the roundel, Christ appears a second time, blessing, above his mother, shown as the one who pleads for humankind. Mary stands again beside the body on the cross, together with Saint John, as the two mourners at Golgotha, and Christ and his mother are labelled with Greek abbreviations. The small panel at the foot tells another story, Peter denying Christ, with the cock whose crowing marked the betrayal. Below it the Saviour's blood runs down into the earth and reaches a skull, which an early tradition said was Adam's, buried beneath Calvary. The museum reads the whole as a hinge between earth and heaven, joining sin and salvation, human history and divine providence.

The cross came to the national gallery in 1956 from Rome's Museo Artistico Industriale, a museum of applied arts.