National Museum of San Matteo

Of the many panels Masaccio painted in 1426 for an altarpiece in Pisa's Carmelite church, Santa Maria del Carmine, only one is still in the city. It shows Saint Paul, bearded and solid, holding his sword and his book, and it hangs in the National Museum of San Matteo. The rest of the altarpiece was taken apart in the 18th century, and its pieces are now scattered between London, Naples, Berlin and Los Angeles.

The museum occupies the former Benedictine convent of San Matteo on the Lungarno, the riverside avenue along the Arno. Its paintings and sculpture were gathered from churches across Pisa and the surrounding province, so most of what you see was made for an altar, and the rooms let you follow Pisan and Tuscan painting from the 12th century onward.

The early rooms hold painted crosses, among them a large crucifix from around 1200 by an anonymous painter working in the Byzantine manner, and another by Giunta Pisano, the leading Pisan painter of the mid-13th century. Simone Martini's polyptych of around 1320, made for the Dominican church of Santa Caterina, sets the Virgin and Child among rows of saints on a gold ground. From the following century come Gentile da Fabriano's Madonna of Humility and a gilded bronze bust of Saint Rossore by Donatello, made to hold the saint's relics in the same years Masaccio was working in Pisa.