On Golden Ground - Loans from the Lindenau-Museum on display at the Alte Pinakothek

The Lindenau Museum in Altenburg (Thuringia) possesses an internationally important collection of Italian panel paintings, of which only a selection is currently on view. This circumstance provided a happy opportunity to enrich the presentation of gold-ground painting in the Alte Pinakothek for a year through the inclusion of generous loans from Altenburg: the three devotional pictures from fourteenth-century Florence, which were acquired by Bernhard August von Lindenau in around 1845, felicitously complement the masterpieces by Giotto and his successors, some of which King Ludwig I of Bavaria was able to purchase for Munich. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Ludwig was one of the first collectors of early Italian painting.

It was with Giotto, who, to much acclaim, overcame the ‘maniera greca’, that modern-age Florentine painting began. The panel paintings on display make strikingly clear the subtle nuances with which the succeeding generations of Trecento artists confronted his dominant overture: while they all without exception had close ties to tradition, and shared a mastery of their craft, they each had an individual style, with discreetly innovative or consciously conservative tendencies. The selected works also document typical examples of the forms and functions of the devotional picture in both the private and the church context, and thus reflect the still tight constraints on artistic freedom.