Polyptyque de sainte Catherine d'Alexandrie

This towering assembly of saints was painted around 1319 and 1320 for the high altar of Santa Caterina, the Dominican church in Pisa. Simone Martini, a Sienese master trained in the gold-ground Gothic manner, filled it with 43 separate figures — the Madonna and Child at the centre, ranks of saints beside them, and smaller prophets and apostles stacked above and below. Across the base he signed it in Latin, 'Simone of Siena painted me', a confident mark from a painter who would soon be working for the papal court at Avignon. The convent's own annals note the day it was set on the altar in 1320. It stayed a Dominican altarpiece for centuries and now hangs a short walk away, in Pisa's museum of San Matteo.