The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John; Saint Anthony Abbot at the Foot of the Cross (one side of a processional banner) (formerly attributed to Barnaba da Modena)

Spinello Aretino's processional banner at the Victoria and Albert Museum, painted around 1370 on the reverse side of the Saints Anthony and Eligius banner, depicts the Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, and Saint Anthony Abbot — an image carried before the faithful in processional devotion. Spinello Aretino was a prolific late-Gothic Florentine fresco painter whose workshop contributed to the decoration of churches in Arezzo, Florence, and Pisa with dynamic Giottesque narrative cycles. The Crucifixion was the most theologically charged subject in Christian art, and its placement on the reverse of a processional banner meant that the worshippers carrying it would present the image of Christ's sacrifice to the crowd they preceded. The two-sided banner format gave confraternities two distinct devotional images — the protective patron saints on one side, the central redemptive mystery on the other — to present alternately during different phases of liturgical procession. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds significant Italian medieval objects alongside its primary collections of decorative arts, and these Spinello Aretino banner panels are among its most important documents of late-Gothic Tuscan popular devotional practice.

This work demonstrates Gothic painting techniques.