Страсбургское Распятие

Small, painted in tempera and gold on a wooden panel around 1315, this Crucifixion carries the name of Giotto, the Florentine who in these very years was teaching European painting to give its figures real weight and grief in place of flat Byzantine grace. Whether his own hand made this one has been argued over for a century. Some scholars gave it firmly to Giotto; others invented a separate anonymous painter, the Master of the Strasbourg Crucifixion, just to hold it and a near-twin panel in Berlin. On the great occasions, such as the Louvre's Giotto exhibition in 2013, it hangs under his name. It was probably once half of a small folding diptych, the kind a person could carry and open for private prayer.