Fantastic, Bizarre and Diabolical Figures in the Art of Santa Croce

The focus of this tour is the grotesque in art, in particular those scenes and monuments in which fantastic figures are depicted or which echo the Gothic style. Orcagna’s imaginary Inferno in the Cenacolo, in which the artist nods at Dante Alighieri’s famous poem, or Lorenzo Monaco’s Triumph of Death on the high altar with its memento mori (“remember that you, too, are going to die”) leitmotif are all works in which the artists paid greater attention to depicting the antagonists of whom to beware than they did to the heroes.