Políptico da Badia

Giotto made this around 1300 for the high altar of the Badia Fiorentina, the old abbey church in the middle of Florence whose bell marked the city's working hours. Dante was living in that same city then, and would later recall the Badia's bell in his poetry, so this is roughly the world he moved through. The polyptych sets the Virgin and Child in the centre with four saints beside her, each named on the frame below and given real weight and shadow rather than the flat gold-ground stiffness of the generation before. It stood on the altar until 1568, when a large picture by Vasari replaced it. Centuries later it survived the great Florence flood of 1966 and is now in the Uffizi.