Museums in England 🇬🇧 (8)

with Italian gold-ground panels in their collection

• National Gallery, London (nationalgallery.org.uk)

  Selection: Margarito d'Arezzo, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Ugolino di Nerio, Pietro Lorenzetti, Jacopo di Cione, Lorenzo Monaco

  This is by far the strongest of the three for the field. The National Gallery houses one of the most important collections of early Italian paintings outside Italy, including works by Cimabue, Duccio, Ugolino di Nerio, Giotto, Bernardo Daddi, and the Cioni brothers and less known painters like Barnaba da Modena, Nardo di Cione, Sassetta, Lippo di Dalmasio, and others also present. The spring 2025 exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300–1350 was a landmark moment: it reunited scenes from Duccio's monumental Maestà altarpiece after centuries of separation, and brought together panels from Simone Martini's glittering Orsini polyptych for the first time in living memory. Worth noting as recent context in any article about the collection.

  Margarito d'Arezzo deserves particular mention: his Virgin and Child Enthroned is one of the earliest works in the Gallery, with bold lines and bright colours drawn from Byzantine and Romanesque prototypes — and he was one of the first artists from the Italian peninsula to sign his works.

  For Ugolino di Nerio: his major work was the altarpiece for the church of Santa Croce in Florence, from which all of the National Gallery's panels come; Ugolino created a more expressive interpretation of Duccio's work, using a novel range of colours.

• The Courtauld Gallery, London (courtauld.ac.uk)

  The Courtauld's 14th/early-15th-century Italian holdings are smaller than the National Gallery's but of high quality. The Daddi polyptych is the centrepiece. The collection also includes panels by Ducciofollowers and later Florentine and Sienese painters, which are not all fully published online. The gallery labels the 14th–early-15th century Italian section as one of the most important in Britain outside the National Gallery.

• Victoria and Albert Museum, London (vam.ac.uk)

Selection: Andrea di Bartolo, Pellegrino di Giovanni

The V&A's primary strength in this period is decorative arts, sculpture and ivories rather than panel painting. Its documented gold-ground Italian panel holdings are modest: it does not have a dedicated early-Italian paintings gallery comparable to the National Gallery or Courtauld. The medieval painting collection spans altarpiece fragments and devotional panels, with the collection catalogue (Kauffmann 1973) listing further minor Florentine and Sienese works. Carlo Crivelli's Madonna and Child with an Apple (c. 1480) is the most celebrated Italian panel in the collection, though it falls after the 1430 boundary.

• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

• York Art Gallery, York

• Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol