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Museums in the United States 🇺🇸 (27)

with Italian gold-ground panels in their collection

The National Gallery of Art holds what is widely considered the most important collection of early Italian paintings in the United States, and among the finest in the world. Its gold-ground holdings are exceptional in depth and scholarly documentation. The collection includes two predella panels from Duccio di Buoninsegna's monumental Maestà (1308–11), making the NGA the only institution in the United States to own works from this pivotal double-sided altarpiece. Alongside these stands a rare autograph panel by Giotto (Madonna and Child, c. 1310–15) and works by Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Nardo di Cione. Gentile da Fabriano is represented by two outstanding panels: a Madonna and Child Enthroned of c. 1420 and a predella scene from the Quaratesi Polyptych (1425). The collection also preserves panels by Agnolo Gaddi, Lorenzo Monaco, and the Master of the Osservanza. Assembled primarily through the gifts of Andrew W. Mellon and Samuel H. Kress, the NGA's Duecento–Trecento holdings occupy their own dedicated galleries and remain a primary research destination for the field.

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (metmuseum.org)

    Selection: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Agnolo Gaddi, Giovanni di Paolo, Gentile da Fabriano, Bartolo di Fredi, Lorenzo Monaco, Pietro Lorenzetti

    The Met's collection of Italian medieval painting spans the full arc from Duccio and Giotto through the late Trecento and International Gothic, drawing on multiple exceptional bequests to build unparalleled depth across both Florentine and Sienese schools. A dedicated gallery is devoted to gold-ground painting, anchored by Duccio's Madonna and Child (c. 1290–1300), notable for its illusionistic parapet — among the first of its kind in Western painting. The Florentine strand is traced through Giotto, Maso di Banco — Ghiberti's "man of greatest genius" and Giotto's most accomplished pupil — Taddeo Gaddi, and Agnolo Gaddi. The Robert Lehman Collection contributes an incomparable group of Sienese works, particularly an extraordinary concentration of Giovanni di Paolo panels including his celebrated Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise. Sassetta is represented by multiple panels including fragments from the great Borgo San Sepolcro altarpiece, his gold-scratching technique creating glittering effects that the museum notes were especially vivid by candlelight. The Met's holdings also include Gentile da Fabriano's early Venetian Madonna and Child with Angels (c. 1410), Bartolo di Fredi, Lorenzo Monaco, and Pietro Lorenzetti. In late 2024 the museum hosted the landmark exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 before it travelled to London, confirming its central role in scholarship on the field.

  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (getty.edu)

    Selection: Gentile da Fabriano, Paolo Veneziano

The Getty's painting collection spans from about 1250 to 1920, and among its defining features are its exquisite late medieval Italian gold-ground panel paintings — a strength the museum has actively cultivated through both acquisitions and dedicated exhibitions. The outstanding figure is Gentile da Fabriano, represented by two panels of the highest quality from around 1420: the Coronation of the Virgin, originally a double-sided processional banner for a confraternity in Fabriano, its surface enriched with extensive gold tooling and pastiglia modelling that the Getty describes as resembling the work of contemporary goldsmiths, and the Nativity (Madonna of Humility), c. 1420–22. Gentile was celebrated in the fifteenth century as the greatest Italian painter of his age, and his technique — delicate brushwork, oil glazes, and intricately tooled gold leaf — is displayed at full intensity in both Getty panels. The Venetian Trecento is represented by Paolo Veneziano, whose Annunciation (c. 1340–45) served as the centrepiece of the Getty's 2021 monographic exhibition. In Paolo's paintings, intricately worked gold grounds and hieratic representations of saints are brought together with naturalistic narrative scenes and complex renderings of spatial form to spectacular effect. The museum's gold-ground holdings were further extended in 2025 by a major gift of Italian manuscript illuminations by Lorenzo Monaco, Giovanni di Paolo, Lippo Vanni, and Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci — to be displayed in a dedicated exhibition in 2027.

When the Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson began collecting art in the late nineteenth century, he defied contemporary taste by acquiring Italian paintings from the early Renaissance. The approximately 1,300 works he bequeathed to the City of Philadelphia in 1917 — now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — form one of the broadest collections of Italian medieval and early Renaissance paintings in North America, documented in Carl Brandon Strehlke's authoritative 2004 catalogue Italian Paintings, 1250–1450. Among the key Trecento works are an angel panel from the upper framing element of Duccio's Maestà (by 1311), three central panels of a dated altarpiece by Bernardo Daddi (1334), and a pentaptych of half-length saints attributed to Allegretto Nuzi (c. 1346) — alongside works by Pietro Lorenzetti, Bartolomeo Bulgarini, Vitale da Bologna, and the Master of the Osservanza. Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, Jacopo di Cione, and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini are also represented. The collection is notable less for a single spectacular holding than for its unusual geographical breadth — Central Italian, Sienese, Florentine, Bolognese, and Venetian schools are all present — making Philadelphia a particularly valuable resource for comparative study of regional traditions within the gold-ground period.

Selection: Pacino di Bonaguida, Lippo Vanni, Lorenzo Monaco, Master of the Panzano Triptych, Andrea di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Bicci, Master of the Straus Madonna

The Walters Art Museum holds one of the most distinguished gatherings of Italian gold-ground panel painting in the United States, the bulk of it entering the collection through Henry Walters' 1902 acquisition of the Massarenti Collection. Its Trecento holdings open with Pacino di Bonaguida's The Virgin and Child with Saints, painted around 1323–1327, one of the earliest and most important Florentine works of its kind on American soil. The Sienese strand is represented by Lippo Vanni's reliquary triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints, painted for private devotion in the second half of the fourteenth century, in which the gold ground is tooled, punched, and worked in sgraffito to lend the surface a shifting, light-reactive depth — a technical highlight for any visitor interested in the craft of gilding.

The early Quattrocento is anchored by Lorenzo Monaco's The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, dated around 1390, alongside two panels of the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints by the Master of the Panzano Triptych, an anonymous Florentine painter active in the fourteenth century. The museum's Trecento and early Renaissance holdings also include works by Andrea di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Bicci, the Master of the Straus Madonna, and Silvestro dei Gherarducci, whose illuminated antiphonary leaf demonstrates the close ties between panel painting and manuscript gilding in this period.

Selection: Master of the Bigallo Crucifix, Ugolino di Nerio, Niccolò di PietroGerini, Francescuccio Ghissi, Paolo Veneziano, Giovanni di Paolo, Sano di Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni

The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the finest and least-published collections of early Italian panel painting in the United States, anchored by works spanning the Duecento through the early Quattrocento, the majority entering the collection through the Martin A. Ryerson bequest. The cornerstone is the Crucifix of around 1240 by the Master of the Bigallo Crucifix, a leading Florentine artist of the mid-thirteenth century working in a style that retains traditional Byzantine-derived linear patterning while introducing a new, more naturalistic system of lighting — one of the earliest works of its kind in any American collection.

The Trecento is represented by a major panel attributed to Ugolino di Nerio, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, and Dominic and a Dominican Supplicant, dated around 1330, a key document of the Sienese workshop tradition descending from Duccio. The same gallery context brings together related Trecento gold-ground works, including a Virgin and Child by Niccolò di PietroGerini from 1390–1400, a Crucifixion by Francescuccio Ghissi from around 1370, and panels by Paolo Veneziano and his workshop depicting Saints Augustine and Peter and Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria, both around 1350.

The most celebrated Sienese holding is the group of six surviving panels by Giovanni di Paolo from a twelve-part series illustrating the life of Saint John the Baptist, originally serving as the doors of a shrine for a relic associated with the saint. The narrative includes scenes of John's birth, his departure for the wilderness, his prophecy of Christ's coming, his baptism of Jesus, his imprisonment, and his beheading at Salome's request, making this one of the most complete Sienese narrative cycles outside Siena itself.

Together with strong holdings of Florentine cassone panels and fifteenth-century Sienese devotional works (Sano di Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni), this makes Chicago a destination collection for Trecento and early Quattrocento gold-ground painting, fully documented in the 1993 scholarly catalogue Italian Paintings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Selection: Ugolino di Nerio, Spinello Aretino

The Cleveland Museum of Art is home to one of the finest collections of medieval art in the United States, and its Italian Trecento gallery is anchored by a work of exceptional rarity. An altarpiece by Ugolino di Nerio, dating to around 1317 and surviving nearly intact, forms a major sightline object in the gallery and is among only a few such intact altarpieces now held in the United States. As a pupil of Duccio and a close observer of Simone Martini, Ugolino's mature style is spiritual and elegant, with a preference for brighter colours that distinguish it from his earliest, more strictly Ducciesque manner.

The late Trecento and early Quattrocento are represented by Spinello Aretino's Virgin and Child with Angels of 1405, a large central panel in tempera and gold on wood from a dismembered altarpiece, showing the Madonna enthroned with the infant Christ, flanked by kneeling angels and six-winged seraphim, with a Dead Christ in the predella zone below and the Blessing Christ above the arch — an ambitious Florentine-Aretine work in which the hierarchical gold-ground programme is still fully operative.

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (mfa.org)

Selection: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Bernardo Daddi