Cristo coronato di spine

For a long time this small panel carried a bigger name than its own. It was filed under Giotto, or Giotto's workshop, the founding figure of Italian painting from a century earlier. Then in the 20th century the sharp-eyed historian Roberto Longhi looked again and gave it to Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar who treated painting as a form of prayer. It is a devotional image, made around the 1430s in tempera and gold: Christ crowned with thorns, shown close and frontal so that whoever knelt before it met his gaze directly. Today it lives in the cathedral of Livorno, the Tuscan port city, in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.