This gallery shows some of the Ashmolean’s impressive collection of early Italian art.
The use of real gold in these paintings is striking and was used up until around 1500 to evoke heavenly glory in religious art while adding 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.
In well-to-do homes, devotional paintings of the Madonna and Child were common and were sometimes hinged with other images into small 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 from larger works such as altar-pieces, which were broken up for sale from the 1790s as a result of political upheavals in Italy. Narrative scenes from the lower section (predella) of altarpieces were popular with collectors.
The panel painting of The Sack of Rome and the Flight of the Vestal Virgins by Biagio di Antonio Tucci (1446–1516) is one example of a narrative scene compressed into a single panel which may have been set into the walls of a room.
An addition to the gallery last year was Fra Angelico's Crucifixion, which thanks to a successful fundraising campaign in 2024, joined a later work by Fra Angelico and his studio. This triptych by Fran Angelico of the Virgin and Child, has been a highlight of the gallery for many years.
