William Poundstone blogs about the exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, on view through February 10, 2013.

Poundstone writes that while "the show makes clear, nobody did it better than Giotto in capturing natural emotion and faking fascinatingly abstract architecture… An alternative pitch is 'the first retrospective of Pacino di Bonaguida.' …Half of its 98 objects are by that rather obscure artist… Pacino was the awkward case, a two steps forward, one step backward talent. Pacino adopted Giotto’s Renaissance modeling and grafted it onto throwback medievalism. The most avant garde thing about Pacino was his taste for novelty. He crafted new takes on conventional subjects and completely novel ones (such as Dante’s bestseller, The Divine Comedy)."