Thieves broke into the Museo Regionale di Messina (MuMe) in Sicily on the night of August 15–16, 2026, while the city was distracted by Ferragosto and the "Vara" procession. The thieves bypassed alarm and security systems to make off with three of the five surviving panels of the San Gregorio Polyptych, dated to 1473, as well as the double-sided panel depicting the Virgin Mary and the Ecce Homo, which had been removed from an armored display case.

They took all five polyptych panels from their frame but abandoned two of them nearby while fleeing — reportedly because the heavy wooden panels proved harder to handle than expected.

All four stolen works are attributed to Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–1479), a pivotal figure who is considered one of the defining masters of the early Italian Renaissance, credited with introducing Flemish realism and oil-painting technique to Italy — and one of the artists who helped move Italian panel painting beyond the gold-ground tradition. The polyptych was the only work by the painter never to have left his hometown.

And by the way: Fame is a stolen painting's curse: the more famous the work, the fewer places it can hide 🕵️‍♂️

Source: Fondo Oro Magazine, fondo-oro.art/news / Photos: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Who would you add to this list?

Il Libro dell’Arte - Around 1400 a Tuscan painter of no great fame wrote down everything he knew. Il Libro dell'Arte is the closest we can get to standing in a Trecento workshop.

Almost nothing survives of the painters who made gold-ground panels. We have the objects; the men who made them are silent. What we do have is one book — Il Libro dell'Arte, written by Cennino d'Andrea Cennini of Colle di Val d'Elsa at the end of the fourteenth century. It is the only substantial account of Italian panel painting written from inside the tradition while the tradition was still alive. Cennino spent twelve years in the Florentine workshop of Agnolo Gaddi, son and pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, who was Giotto's pupil; he makes a great deal of that lineage. He is the reverse of the usual case: normally the panel survives without its painter, here the painter survives without a single picture we can give him.

Where to start: Lara Broecke, Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte: A New English Translation and Commentary with Italian Transcription (Archetype, 2015) — now the standard, correcting more than four hundred errors in Daniel V. Thompson's long-dominant The Craftsman's Handbook (1933), which remains in print. In German, Albert Ilg's 1871 translation is freely available, if antique.

Read more: https://fondo-oro.art/news/il-libro-dell-arte-2026

Margarito d'Arezzo's Virgin and Child Enthroned (c. 1263–64, NG564) is the oldest painting in the National Gallery, London. It came in with a group of twenty-two early Florentine and Sienese panels bought from the Florentine dealers Lombardi and Baldi in 1857, under the Gallery's first director, Charles Eastlake.

The Gallery's own annual report for 1858 justified the purchase on the grounds that such pictures showed the barbarous state into which art had sunk in Italy before its revival. It wasn't bought as a good painting. It was bought as evidence of a low point — connective tissue in a story ending at Raphael.

That framing goes back to Vasari, who credited Giotto with banishing "quella goffa maniera greca," the clumsy Greek manner. Once gold-ground painting is defined as a stage rather than a style, the objects become historically interesting and aesthetically disposable at the same time — and you can see the consequences physically. Duccio's Maestà was sawn into seven parts in 1771 so its two faces could serve separate altars; the blade cut through the Virgin and Child, and panels ended up in London, Washington and New York. Margarito's own panel was re-gilded and overpainted in the early 19th century in a way conservators only reversed recently, revealing an original border pattern in orpiment yellow that had been hidden for two centuries.

What I find striking is that the revaluation, when it came, mostly wasn't about painting either. Rio (1836) and Lord Lindsay (1847) valued these works for piety and moral seriousness. The Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites read the flatness and gold as sincerity rather than as deliberate pictorial choices. The shift to something like modern study arrives with Crowe and Cavalcaselle's A New History of Painting in Italy (1864–66), which treats Trecento painters as artists with careers instead of as symptoms of an era.

The word "primitives" survived all of it and is still in use.

Sources: National Gallery catalogue entry for NG564 and their conservation write-up on the treatment; the 1858 annual report language is quoted in the literature on Margarito.

Longer piece with the full source list: https://fondo-oro.art/news/before-they-were-masterpieces-2026

In The Art of Looking Closely: Fra Angelico's Divine Light I've written about my very personal encounter with Fra Angelico's divine light being in close proximity to his illuminating Annunciation in Cortona. Gabriel’s radiant wings and shimmering gold were designed to reflect candlelight to remind worshippers that this was more than a painting - it was an invitation to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. Even though we saw the painting with far from perfect museum lighting, we were able to be able to be alone with this masterwork and get up quite close to see the incisions in the gold that create this remarkable effect.

Angelico painted at least five Annunciations, three on panels - one for the Convent of San Domenico in Fiesole (c. 1426, now in the Prado), one in San Giovanni Valdarno (1430-32), one in Cortona (1433-34) - and two in fresco some years later for the Convent of San Marco in Florence. Fra Angelico’s Cortona Annunciation was commissioned by Giovanni di Cola di Cecco, a cloth merchant, for Cortona’s San Domenico church. The panel was once thought to be the first of Angelico’s Annunciations – a belief no longer widely adhered to – but it is without a doubt one of his most sublime creations.

Are you familiar with the iconography of the Annunciation and the differences between the Annunciations by Angelico? And have you seen any of his Annunciations?

***Read the essay here: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/the-art-of-looking-closely

Beyond stylistic attribution: Erling Skaug’s «Punch Marks» as the foundational corpus for Italian gold-ground panel painting

In 1994, the late Norwegian art conservator and professor Erling Sigvard Skaug (1938–2022) published a massive, two-volume monograph that permanently transformed early Italian art history: Punch Marks - from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting (c. 1330–1430).

Over three decades, Skaug traveled across public institutions and private collections worldwide. Armed with macro-photography, precision gauges, and a conservator’s eye, he meticulously documented thousands of micro-impressions stamped into the gilded halos and borders of 14th- and 15th-century Tuscan panels.

Thirty years later, in an era with computers and AI, a key question arises for scholars and collectors alike: Is Skaug’s work still the definitive reference today? The short answer is yes. Skaug’s two volumes remain the undisputed foundational text.

Because the Gospels give painters almost nothing here. Only Luke tells one story from between Christ's infancy and his adult life: at twelve, Jesus stays behind in the Temple in Jerusalem to argue with the scholars, and his parents search three days before they find him. Simone Martini painted it as a family scene — a boy with folded arms, a mother's reproach written in Latin on her book: "Son, why have you dealt with us like this?" This is the only relevant Italian gold-ground panel painting showing Christ who is neither a child nor a man.

Simone Martini, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342. Signed and dated on the frame; painted in Avignon at the papal court. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool (WAG 2787).

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

"Das volle Leben. Alte Meister von Duccio bis Liotard" Kunstmuseum Bern, CH 🇨🇭, February 13 – September 27, 2026

For a few months this year, one of the most remarkable holdings of early Italian painting in Switzerland is on public view again. The Kunstmuseum Bern has drawn its finest older works out of storage for Das volle Leben ("The Full Life"), a wide-ranging presentation of its collection of Old Masters — and, tucked into a single cabinet, it offers gold-ground enthusiasts a rare reason to make the trip to the Aare.

At its centre is a small, precious devotional panel by Duccio di Buoninsegna — a name that needs no introduction to anyone who has followed the Sienese tradition. Around it hang works by Bernardo and Taddeo Daddi, carrying the Florentine line from Giotto's circle into the fourteenth century; a panel by Fra Angelico, whose gold grounds bridge medieval devotion and early Renaissance clarity; and a work from the workshop of Sandro Botticelli, marking the moment the gold ground gives way to something new.

The Duccio alone justifies the visit.

Kunstmuseum Bern, Hodlerstrasse 8–12, 3011 Bern, kunstmuseumbern.ch

Photo credits: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà, c. 1288 – 1300, photo credits: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

If you want to understand why American museums hold so many Italian gold-ground panel paintings — and why they are distributed so unexpectedly across the country, from Birmingham to El Paso to Seattle — there is one name you need to know: Samuel Henry Kress. Read more about this impressive story here 👇

«How Italian gold-ground Masters conquered the American heartland»
https://fondo-oro.art/news/how-gold-ground-masters-conquered-the-american-heartland-2026

#kressfoundation #samuelkress #USA #NewYork #Collection #kresscollection #goldground #italianart #duccio #cimabue #giotto

Hey everyone! I'm u/therealrodesi, the founding moderator of r/GoldGroundArt.

Gold-ground art from Italy — roughly 1250 to 1430 — is one of the most extraordinary traditions in Western art history. From Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto and Gentile da Fabriano, these luminous devotional works defined an era and shaped everything that came after.

This community is for anyone drawn to this world: collectors, art historians, museum professionals, gallerists, students, and curious minds who simply love these paintings.

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A resource worth knowing: Fondo Oro Magazine is an independent digital publication dedicated exclusively to this tradition — the only one of its kind. Worth bookmarking if this period is your thing.

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Did you know?

The impact of this single panel can hardly be overstated. Giotto's groundbreaking template—known as the archetype of the Christus patiens (the suffering Christ)—rapidly spread throughout Tuscany and Central Italy, setting an entirely new baseline for religious representation in the fourteenth century.

More about it here: https://fondo-oro.art/news/how-giottos-santa-maria-novella-crucifix-reconstructed-art-history-2026

#giotto #giottodibondone #florence #goldground #fondooro