Распятие Христа

For a long time this small panel carried one of the biggest names in painting. In 1884 Wilhelm von Bode, who ran the Berlin museums, declared it the work of Giotto himself, pointing to the grief in the mourning figures and their newly solid, weighty bodies. Later scholars were less sure. Roberto Longhi doubted it in 1948, and others grouped it with related small paintings under an anonymous hand they named the Master of the Strasbourg Crucifixion, after a companion piece. The question is still open. What is not in doubt is the moment it belongs to, around 1315, when painters in central Italy were first giving holy figures real bodies and real weight.