Research Corner
A curated list of academic papers on Italian gold-ground panel painting from the Duecento, Trecento, and early Quattrocento.
Entries are selected for their relevance in the field.
Maria Letizia Amadori, Valeria Mengacci, Mauro Sebastianelli, Bruno Pignataro, Simonpietro Agnello, Paolo Triolo and Claudia Pellerito (2023)
In Heritage, 2023, 6(6), 4692-4709, 🔓 Open Access (MDPI)
The Virgin Hodegetria in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Nuova in Monreale, near Palermo, is among the earliest surviving examples of medieval panel painting in Sicily, tentatively dated to the first half of the thirteenth century. A recent diagnostic campaign — combining non-invasive imaging techniques with micro-analytical methods — has shed new light on both its materials and its making. The results confirm a sophisticated execution firmly rooted in Italian painting tradition of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: a wooden support prepared with a double canvas layer, multiple gypsum grounds, and an underdrawing applied in carbonaceous black. The original palette comprised red ochre, red lead, azurite, and various blacks, while later restoration campaigns introduced mercury-based reds, indigo, smalt, and orpiment. The frame, originally covered in silver leaf and red tin-based lake, was subsequently regilded. Beyond its art-historical significance, the study offers a rare technical portrait of a Sicilian icon at the crossroads of Byzantine devotional tradition and Italian workshop practice.
Steinhoff, Judith (2000)
Artistic working relationships after the Black Death: a Sienese "compagnia", c. 1350–1363(?)
In Renaissance Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (MARCH 2000), pp. 1-45 (45 pages), 🔒 Subscription (JSTOR)
The Black Death of 1348 did not merely devastate Siena's population — it reshaped the very structure of its artistic life. This article examines a group of stylistically heterogeneous Sienese paintings from the 1350s and 1360s and argues that the disruptions of plague and economic crisis drove painters from different workshop traditions into new, loosely organised forms of collaboration. Analysing both stylistic and technical evidence, the author identifies an inter-workshop network — a compagnia — that served a protective economic function while simultaneously fostering a more synthetic pictorial idiom, distinct from the coherent workshop styles of the pre-plague generation. The study offers a fresh perspective on one of Italian art history's enduring questions: what happened to Sienese painting after the Black Death?
Polzer, Joseph (1993)
Pietro Lorenzetti's Artistic Origin and His Place in Trecento Sienese Painting
In Jahrbuch Der Berliner Museen, vol. 35, 1993, pp. 71–110., 🔓 Free online reading (JSTOR)
Where does Pietro Lorenzetti truly come from? Challenging the long-held assumption that he derives from Duccio, Joseph Polzer traces his earliest artistic formation instead to the ambient of Memmo di Filippuccio. Through close analysis of his murals at Assisi and his panel production, Polzer reveals a remarkably complex early evolution — one that resists any simple linear reading and draws on a rich mixture of retrospective and contemporary influences. Chief among these is northern Gothic sculpture, absorbed both directly and through the mediating œuvre of Giovanni Pisano, which shaped Pietro's distinctive commitment to the realistic depiction of the human figure in structure, action, and behaviour — a commitment that set him apart from every other Sienese painter of his generation.
Brink, Joel (1977)
Measure and Proportion in the Monumental Gabled Altarpieces of Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto
In RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1977), pp. 69-77 (9 pages), 🔓 Free online reading (JSTOR)
What hidden order governs the great Tuscan altarpieces of the late Duecento and early Trecento? In this focused structural study, Joel Brink argues that the monumental gabled retables of Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto — produced in Tuscany between approximately 1280 and 1310 — share a coherent geometric design system rooted in the sides and diagonals of the square and the generation of root rectangles. Analysing the carpentry proportions comparatively across several closely related works, he identifies a consistent pattern of incommensurable ratios that precedes the application of gesso, gold, and paint entirely. The luminous surfaces we admire were, it turns out, laid onto an armature already alive with mathematical intention.