The Divine Comedy
1321 · 798 pages
No poem has reached higher. Dante goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the light of God, settling scores with real Florentines and arriving where Beatrice waits.
★ 9.8
Browse by time · century
14th century
1301 – 1400
Showing 77 works across all media from the 14th century
The Canterbury Tales
1390 · 528 pages
Chaucer's thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury swapping stories, the knight a courtly romance and the miller a filthy joke, and he wrote them in English when serious poetry meant Latin or French.
★ 8.9
Maesta (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
When Duccio finished it in 1311 the whole of Siena walked it to the cathedral in procession, with the bells going the entire way.
★ 8.8
Lamentation
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Two mourners sit with their backs turned to pull us in, and the angels overhead double over. Giotto frescoed it in the Arena Chapel at Padua.
★ 8.3
Annunciation (Martini)
1333 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Gabriel's greeting runs toward Mary in raised gold letters and she twists away from it, her thumb still caught in her book.
★ 8.2
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
1350 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
A collector loved the scroll so much he tried to have it burned with him at death. It was pulled from the fire in two pieces.
★ 8.0
The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Torches and spears bristle against the sky, and at the still center Judas wraps Christ in his yellow cloak and meets his eye.
★ 7.6
Ognissanti Madonna
1310 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Where Cimabue and Duccio floated their Madonnas on gold, Giotto gave his weight, a real throne, and a body that presses through the cloth.
★ 7.6
The Rongxi Studio
1372 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
An empty pavilion, a few dry trees, no people at all. Ni Zan gave away his estate and spent his last years on a houseboat.
★ 7.5
The Decameron
1353 · 909 pages
Ten young Florentines flee the plague to a country house and spend ten days telling a hundred stories of seduced wives, crooked friars, and lucky fools. The jokes still land six centuries later.
★ 7.5
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author unknown
1375 · 198 pages
At Arthur's Christmas court a huge green man offers his neck to anyone willing to take the same blow a year later. Gawain swings, and the real test waits in a bedroom.
★ 7.4
Inferno
1321 · 296 pages
Lost in a dark wood, Dante follows the Roman poet Virgil down through nine circles, past lovers, popes, and traitors frozen in ice. Every punishment is built to answer its sin.
★ 7.3
Essays in Idleness
1330 · 224 pages
Writing in fourteenth-century Japan, the monk Kenko set down fragments on manners, boredom, and death, asking why we look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom. Impermanence makes attention urgent.
★ 7.0
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Author unknown
1386 · 592 pages
Chanted to the newly dead across the forty-nine days between one life and the next, Tibetan Buddhism's manual for dying insists that the radiant and monstrous deities arriving are the mind's own projections.
★ 6.7
The Muqaddimah
1377 · 512 pages
Ibn Khaldun found history's engine in group solidarity, which carries a tribe from desert to throne, then dissolves in city luxury within three generations. Europe produced nothing comparable for centuries.
★ 6.7
The Travels
1355 · 472 pages
Ibn Battuta left Morocco at twenty-one for the hajj and stayed away twenty-nine years, judging cases in Delhi and crossing the Sahara to Mali. He dictated all 75,000 miles from memory.
★ 6.7
The Crucifixion
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
This is the largest scene on the back of the Maesta, the Virgin fainting on one side and the crowd arguing on the other.
★ 6.6
St. Martin Shares his Cloak with a Beggar
1326 · San Francesco Church (Assisi), Assisi
Martin cuts his soldier's cloak in half with his sword to give a beggar the other part, dressed by Simone in courtly gold.
★ 6.5
Revelations of Divine Love
1395 · 288 pages
The earliest surviving English book by a woman came from an anchoress sealed into a cell beside a Norwich church. Julian saw all creation lying in her palm, small as a hazelnut.
★ 6.5
Adoration of the Magi (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Giotto had watched Halley's Comet in 1301 and painted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet, apparently the first artist to do it.
★ 6.3
Christ Entering Jerusalem (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Boys climb the trees to break off palm branches while the procession moves along a stage-like ledge under deep blue. Padua, around 1305.
★ 6.1
Annunciation to the Shepherds
1338 · Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence
A shepherd twists onto his back and throws up a hand against the glare. One of the first real night scenes in Western art.
★ 6.1
Christ Entering Jerusalem (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Duccio and Giotto painted this same entry within a year of each other. Duccio's is the crowded one, full of towers, incident and color.
★ 5.7
Crucifix (Giotto)
1312 · Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Where Cimabue's Christ swings in an elegant curve, Giotto's hangs straight down under his own weight, belly sagging, head on his chest.
★ 5.7
The Entombment (Martini)
1340 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
One woman flings both arms over her head, others press their faces to the body. Simone drops all restraint against a sky streaked red.
★ 5.6
The Temptation of Christ (Duccio)
1311 · The Frick Collection, New York City
The Devil offers all the kingdoms of the world, rendered as tiny gold-edged walled towns scattered down the slopes, and is refused.
★ 5.4
The Massacre of the Innocents (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Herod gestures from a balcony while soldiers pull babies out of their mothers' arms. Giotto carries the horror on the mothers' faces alone.
★ 5.4
Messe de Nostre Dame
1365
Machaut left money for this mass to be sung at an altar in Reims Cathedral in his memory, and it was, for centuries.
★ 5.3
Maddona with Child and Six Angels
1305 · Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia
Six angels lean in along the throne with their heads tilted, which turns a rigid Byzantine formula into something nearly intimate.
★ 5.2
The Nativity (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
The Virgin lies on the hillside and turns to lay her son in the manger, looking at his face. No gold, just a cold blue sky.
★ 5.2
The Road to Calvary (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
A soldier drags Christ out through the city gate by his robe, the diagonal of the cross cutting against a bristling line of lances.
★ 5.1
The Wedding Feast of Cana
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Servants stoop over the great stone jars in the foreground to draw out wine that was water a moment ago.
★ 5.0
The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew
1311 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The brothers pause with the net still trailing fish through green water, caught between the work and the man on the shore.
★ 4.9
The Carrying of the Cross (Martini)
1335 · Louvre, Paris
Christ in vivid red is hauled by a rope through the gate of a white, many-towered Jerusalem while children scamper at the edge.
★ 4.9