r/GoldGroundArt

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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

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