The Tree of Life
Pacino di Bonaguida (active about 1303 to 1347) · about 1310 to 1315
A great tree rises against a gold sky, and Christ hangs crucified upon its trunk. From the trunk spread twelve branches, and on each branch hang round medallions like fruit, forty seven of them, each painted with a tiny scene from the life of Christ. At the foot of the tree are the stories of Genesis, the creation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden, and at the top sits Christ in majesty among the saints and the Virgin. It is a whole theology in a single image, and one of the most unusual altarpieces of the Middle Ages.
The idea comes from a text. Saint Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian, wrote a meditation called the Tree of Life in which the events of Christ's life are arranged as fruits on a tree with twelve branches, to be picked one by one in prayer. Pacino di Bonaguida turned the words into paint for the nuns of the convent of Monticelli outside Florence, and each medallion is inscribed with Bonaventure's phrase so that a reader could follow. Look at the medallions with a slow eye: the tiny figures are drawn with the clarity of a manuscript illuminator, which Pacino also was, and the gold background is punched and tooled in patterns that catch the light.
Pacino was a contemporary of Giotto and ran a busy workshop producing panels and illuminated books, but this is his masterpiece. The painting came to the Academy after the suppression of the convent in the early nineteenth century. It is displayed in the quiet rooms of gold-ground painting, where most visitors never go, and it rewards those who do: bring your eyes close and read the story from the bottom up, as the nuns were meant to.
Did You Know? Each of the forty seven medallions carries a short inscription from Saint Bonaventure, so the painting was meant to be read as much as looked at.
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