13th century
Showing 32 works across all media from the 13th century
Summa Theologica
Aquinas asks thousands of questions about God, law, virtue, and sin, and answers each only after stating the strongest case against himself. Catholic thought has been arguing with him for 750 years.
The Essential Rumi
Grief for a wandering dervish named Shams turned Rumi into a poet of longing for God. His great Masnavi opens with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from.
The Prose Edda
A Swedish king walks into a hall and asks three strangers how the world began and how it ends. Their answers are nearly all anyone now knows about Thor, Loki, and Ragnarok.
Maesta (Cimabue)
Six angels stack up the sides of the throne against gold. Cimabue taught Giotto, and the throne here is just beginning to recede into space.
Rucellai Madonna
Four and a half meters tall, the largest panel painted in its century, with six angels kneeling to steady a throne that seems to float.
Hojoki
Writing from a hut ten feet square, a Kyoto recluse recalls the fire, whirlwind, famine, and earthquake that destroyed the capital, and concludes that nothing built by people is meant to stay.
Crucifix
The Arno flood of 1966 stripped most of the paint off it, and the ruined cross became the emblem of the whole disaster.
Madonna and Child (Duccio)
Christ reaches up to push his mother's veil aside. Scorch marks on the original frame record centuries of candles set before it.
The Travels of Marco Polo
Seventeen years at Kublai Khan's court, and Polo comes back describing paper money, black stones that burn, and cities richer than anything in Europe. Columbus annotated his copy and went looking for them.
Madonna Enthroned
Four prophets peer from arches under the throne holding scrolls that foretell the Virgin Birth, and the throne is angled to suggest depth.
Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata
Golden rays come off a winged crucified figure in the sky and strike Francis in the hands, feet and side. Giotto signed this one.
The Romance of the Rose
Courtly love as siege warfare: a dreamer enters a garden, and Jean de Meun's vast continuation spends twenty thousand lines besieging one rosebud. Christine de Pizan's attack on it started a centuries-long argument.
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds
Two trees, a strip of ground, and a flock that stays to listen. Giotto tells the miracle as though it simply happened.
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (Louvre)
The same story at miniature scale, squeezed into a predella panel, and Giotto loses none of the plainness that made it convincing.
The Flagellation of Christ (Cimabue)
No bigger than a page, and one of very few works securely given to Cimabue, whom Dante named the best painter of his day.