Scenes from the Life of Christ

On the back of this small panel someone once wrote, in Italian, by Master Giotto, and the rest of the line is lost. The name was wrong, though not by much. The painter was Giovanni da Rimini, who worked in that city on the Adriatic coast, and he made it in the first decade of the 1300s. The art historian Roberto Longhi first gave it to him in 1935. In 1947 it was briefly assigned to Neri da Rimini, an illuminator of manuscripts, because of the long figures with tiny heads and the minute detail.

Six scenes fill it, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, Christ's descent into Limbo, the Resurrection and the Last Judgement. The subjects follow Byzantine models, while the bodies and the space around them show the lesson of Giotto.

The panel has a companion of almost the same size, with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and other saints. Both were in the Barberini collection at the end of the 17th century. The other went to England, where the Duke of Northumberland bought it in 1853, also as a Giotto, and in 2015 it was acquired by the National Gallery in London. For a long time the two were treated as the wings of one diptych, and the museum says that technical studies and the choice of subjects now cast doubt on it.