Video recommendation: Megan Holmes on the Lives of Italian Renaissance Panel Paintings

Fondo Oro:

This compelling lecture by Megan Holmes explores the fascinating afterlives of Italian Renaissance panel paintings, from their creation to collection and conservation. It delves into how these gold-ground masterpieces were evaluated, acquired, and preserved across centuries, revealing layers of historical context beyond their initial devotional purpose. The talk connects connoisseurship with material history, offering fresh insights into the cultural biography of Fondo Oro treasures.

“Collections of Italian Renaissance panel paintings were in many cases assembled through a process of connoisseurial evaluation. The National Gallery of Art collection is no exception: a number of the paintings passed that evaluative scrutiny in spite of surface damage in the form of intentional scratches—noted in later conservation reports as “vandalism.” Defacement and disfiguration are, in fact, fairly common features of panel paintings, but they are rarely mentioned in art-historical accounts. The paintings, once installed in religious, domestic, and civic spaces in Renaissance Italy, were acted upon and transformed by the people who encountered and used them in their daily lives. The recovery of representational scratches provides a timely opportunity to tell the history of Italian Renaissance art differently, revealing the complex earlier “lives” of paintings in the hands of beholders.”