Saint Cecilia and scenes from her life

This panel was built to be read scene by scene. Saint Cecilia sits at the center on a wide throne, holding a book and the palm that marks a martyr, and eight small scenes run around her in order. It opens at her wedding feast in Rome, where she marries the nobleman Valerian. She persuades him to live in chastity and to become a Christian, an angel crowns the couple with flowers, and she preaches to Valerian and his brother Tiburtius. The later boxes carry the legend to its close. She is brought before the Roman prefect Almachius, set in a bath of boiling water where she is said to have kept singing, and finally beheaded. The gold ground and the neat compartments belong to the way stories were told on Florentine altars around 1300. The whole panel once stood in the church of Santa Cecilia in Florence, and it reached the Uffizi in 1844.