Stories of the Passion of Christ

This panel tells only the second half of a story. Its six scenes all come after Christ's death, and they read anticlockwise from the top left, the Deposition from the cross, the Lamentation, the Resurrection, the Descent into Limbo, the Ascension and Pentecost. In 1958 the art historian Federico Zeri linked it with a similar panel in the city museum of Rimini that carries the episodes before the death. Together with other pieces still missing, the two once formed the dossal, the painted back of an altar, in the Franciscan convent of Villa Verucchio, a few miles inland from Rimini.

Neither panel shows the Crucifixion. The scene that joined the two halves of the story must have been painted on a separate section, above them or between them, and it has not been found.

The museum catalogues the work as from the circle of Giovanni Baronzio, a painter of Rimini, and dates it between about 1325 and 1340. It belonged to the Russian collector Count Grigory Stroganoff in Rome and later to Henriette Hertz, whose bequest brought it to the state in 1915.