Pentecost

When Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century painter and biographer of artists, saw this altarpiece on the high altar of Santi Apostoli, one of the oldest churches in Florence, he took it for a work by Spinello Aretino. Guidebooks repeated him for nearly three centuries. Only in the 19th century did scholars move it to Andrea di Cione, called Orcagna, and today it is given to him together with his younger brother Jacopo di Cione, painted around 1362 to 1365. Orcagna's hand is in the blocky, strictly frontal apostles, Jacopo's in a few softer faces.

The Virgin kneels at the centre with the 12 apostles around her as the Holy Spirit comes down on them. A restoration finished in 2019 brought back how carefully the metal was worked. Every halo has its own flower pattern, and along the border silver leaf was laid over gold to give a bronze-like sheen. It hangs in the ground-floor room of Orcagna and his brothers, reopened in September 2020, a few steps from the hall where most visitors start their walk toward Michelangelo's David.