Stefaneschi Triptych

Most scholars date this altarpiece to around 1320, a few nearer 1300, and by 1320 the popes no longer lived in Rome. They had settled at Avignon, in the south of France, and the Roman cardinal who paid for it, Jacopo Caetani Stefaneschi, spent his later years at the papal court there. He kept giving to Saint Peter's all the same. The old basilica's register of its dead, written down decades later, records that he gave a panel painted by the hand of Giotto for one of its altars, and that it cost 800 gold florins. He had also paid Giotto for the Navicella, a great mosaic of Peter's boat for the basilica's forecourt.

The triptych is painted on both sides, because the altar stood free and was seen from front and back. Stefaneschi kneels on each side. On one he is at the feet of Christ enthroned. On the other he holds up to Saint Peter a small model of this very altarpiece, a painting that contains a picture of itself. On the wings, Peter is crucified head down between two ancient monuments that stood near the Vatican, one of them a pyramid, and Paul is beheaded outside the city.

The commission is recorded as Giotto's, though much of the actual painting is thought to be the work of his workshop.