San Luca

We do not know this painter's name. He is called the Master of the Magdalen after another panel, and he worked in Florence in the late 1200s, a generation before Giotto began to loosen the old formulas. That older manner is all over this Saint Luke. The gold ground, the long solemn figure, the flat patterned space owe more to Byzantine models than to anything we would call lifelike. Luke is shown as one of the four evangelists, the author of a gospel, holding his book. There is a nice coincidence in a Florentine painting him at all, because Luke was also the patron saint of painters, the man whose guild these anonymous masters belonged to. This panel is among the earliest things the Uffizi owns.