The Crucifixion

In March 1921 this little panel was in Berlin, with the dealer Paul Cassirer. Two months later it had passed through Julius Böhler's gallery in Munich and reached a buyer in Stockholm, sold as the work of an unknown Italian painter of about 1400. The buyer was Osvald Sirén, a Swedish art historian who had written on Giotto and his Florentine followers, and in 1923 he sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts for 3,750 dollars.

The museum now gives it to Bernardo Daddi and places it before 1328, more than 70 years earlier than the date it was sold under. The panel is about 40 centimetres high. Christ hangs on the cross against a gold ground, with the mourners gathered below.

Writing to the museum in 1936, Sirén remembered buying it during the First World War, although the Munich dealer's card records the sale in May 1921.