Baroncelli Chapel

Look for the shepherds in the dark. On the walls of this chapel, at the end of the right transept of Santa Croce, an angel appears to them in a burst of light against a night sky, one of the earliest true night scenes in Italian painting. The painter was Taddeo Gaddi, who spent more than 20 years as Giotto's pupil and assistant, and who covered the chapel between about 1328 and 1338 with scenes from the life of the Virgin.

The Baroncelli were a Florentine banking family, and this was their burial chapel, with the family tomb set at its entrance. Gaddi also painted fictive wall niches holding the vessels of the Mass, a trick of the eye that must have looked startlingly real to people in the 14th century.

On the altar stands the polyptych of the Coronation of the Virgin, signed 'Opus Magistri Jocti', the work of Master Giotto. Most scholars see several hands in it, Gaddi's among them, and its panels are crowded with ranks of saints and angels. Late in the 15th century the painter Sebastiano Mainardi reset the panels in a rectangular Renaissance frame, and the original Gothic pinnacle, God the Father with angels, ended up in the San Diego Museum of Art. Mainardi also left a fresco of his own in the chapel, the Virgin letting her girdle fall to Saint Thomas.