Duomo di Livorno

In 1837 a man named Silvestro Silvestri gave a small panel of Christ crowned with thorns to Santa Maria del Soccorso, a church then going up in Livorno, and a note on the back called it a Giotto. Local opinion doubted him, and for most of the next century it passed as the work of an anonymous follower of Giotto. In 1928 the art historian Roberto Longhi identified it as a painting by Fra Angelico, the Florentine friar-painter of the early 15th century, and later studies agreed. The face is close up and unflinching, with reddened eyes and blood running down from the thorns.

Since 2006, when the diocese of Livorno marked its 200th anniversary, the panel has been shown in the cathedral, on the altar of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the left transept. It still belongs to the Soccorso parish. In 2025 it was lent to the large Fra Angelico exhibition in Florence.

The cathedral itself is largely a postwar rebuilding. Designed by Bernardo Buontalenti, the Medici court architect, and consecrated in 1606, it was almost entirely destroyed by bombing in 1943 and 1944 and reconstructed by 1953. The paintings by Jacopo Ligozzi, Domenico Passignano and Jacopo Chimenti, known as Empoli, survived the bombing and were put back in the wooden ceiling.