The Ascension

Padua in the first half of the 14th century had Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, finished around 1305, and a growing school of local painters. This Ascension, 29 centimetres tall, was painted there by a hand nobody has named, and the Louvre files it simply under the Paduan school.

It was never meant to stand alone. The Louvre sees it as one leaf of a small folding polyptych, perhaps of four panels, together with another Paduan panel in its own collection and probably a Crucifixion now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid. A Virgin and Child in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been linked to the same group, though the Louvre thinks it is by another painter. The panel was shown in Rimini in 1995 and in Padua in 2011, in an exhibition on Guariento, the leading painter of the city under the Carrara family, its lords from 1318.