The Crucifixion

This small panel is one half of a folding pair made for private prayer. Its other wing, a Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Francis and the nine choirs of angels in its gable, is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Folded shut, the pair would have shown its backs, and the back of the Louvre's wing is decorated too, with a punched pattern around a central lozenge.

The names attached to it trace a century of argument over Sienese painting. In 1917 it was sold in Berlin from the collection of Richard von Kaufmann as a work of Barna da Siena, a painter known mainly from Vasari's Lives. When the Louvre bought it in 1984, its inventory entered it as Lippo Memmi. Today the museum says only that it was painted in the Memmi family workshop around 1340, and that some give it to Lippo and others to his brother-in-law, Simone Martini. New York keeps its wing under Lippo's name.