Saint Pancras Polyptych

Look at the Christ Child in the central panel. With one hand he reaches for the lilies his mother holds, and in the other he grips a small goldfinch. That bird was a familiar code in Italian painting for the Passion still to come, the ending folded quietly into the infant. This panel is the middle of a huge polyptych, once about four metres across, painted around 1338 for the high altar of San Pancrazio, a Vallombrosan monastery church in Florence. On that altar it would have risen high above the monks at prayer. Two centuries later the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari saw it there and set it down as a work of Agnolo Gaddi, a painter of the next generation, so for a long time Daddi received none of the credit.