This gallery shows some of the Ashmolean’s impressive collection of early Italian art.
The use of real gold in these paintings is particularly striking. Gold was frequently used as a background in Christian art until around 1500, or used to add eye-catching highlights to narrative scenes. The use of ultramarine, a blue pigment made from the expensive mineral lapis lazuli, is also present in several of the works here and was especially reserved for the cloak of the Virgin Mary.
In well-to-do homes, devotional paintings of the Madonna and Child were common and were sometimes hinged with other panels to create small folding and portable works. You'll find beautiful examples of these in the gallery.
Many of the paintings here, such as St Nicholas of Bari banishing the Storm, are fragments of larger altar-pieces, many of which were dismantled and sold off in pieces from the 1790s onwards as a result of the suppression of religions institutions in Italy.
Some of the panels on show, such as The Sack of Rome and the Flight of the Vestal Virgins by Biagio di Antonio Tucci (1446–1516), were made as pieces of furniture and were set into wall panelling or chests that would have decorated grand Renaissance palaces.
A recent addition to the gallery is Fra Angelico's Crucifixion, which thanks to a successful fundraising campaign in 2024, joined a later work by Fra Angelico and his studio, The Virgin and Child flanked by Standing Saints, in the Ashmolean collection. NB Both of the paintings by Fra Angelico have been temporarily removed and are on loan to the Fra Angelico exhibition held at two venues in Florece, the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco. They return to the Museum in February 2026.
On the same wall as the Fra Angelico artworks, an even newer addition to the gallery is a reframed painting of the Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516). This reframing was part of a larger restoration project generously funded by Fondation Etrillard, which you can read about below.
