Anna McGee

Art historians​ were once preoccupied with periodisation. In the 20th century, Fra Angelico’s work, which spans the late 1410s to the early 1450s, was variously described as Gothic or Renaissance, with its gold grounds and hieratic poses as well as its perspectival constructions and naturalistic expressions. His exclusively pious subject matter made him seem conservative; but his...

Between​ 1240 and 1300, the population of Florence doubled, reaching almost a hundred thousand. There were more mouths to feed than ever before, but the Tuscan soil was poor, so from the 1270s the communal government began to import grain from southern Italy and set up a market in the centre of Florence in which to sell it. The market stood on the site of the vegetable garden (or orto) of an...

When an enormous​ 14th-century polyptych made for the Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore was bought by the National Gallery in 1857, the director, Charles Eastlake, didn’t really know what to do with it. The altarpiece, painted by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop in the early 1370s, is one of the biggest made in the 14th century and, even though it had been dismantled after the...