Titian’s Assunta, painted 1516–1518 for the Frari in Venice, is nearly seven metres tall and helped define Venetian colour against Florentine drawing. Exiled to the Accademia from 1817 to 1919, it was conserved again between 2018 and 2022.
Old Masters
Painting, sculpture and fresco from the Trecento to the eighteenth century, and the scholarship that keeps changing how we see it.
The mathematician who painted night for the first time
Piero della Francesca spent fourteen years on the Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo, applying the geometry of his own perspective treatise. Forgotten for centuries, the cycle was restored between 1985 and 2000.
The twenty-one-year job that gave back an honest ruin
Leonardo’s experimental technique made The Last Supper start decaying almost at once. A 1978–1999 restoration stripped away centuries of repainting, dividing critics between an authentic wreck and a lost masterpiece.
Inside the blue room Giotto painted for a moneylender’s son
Giotto’s 1303–1305 fresco cycle for Enrico Scrovegni broke with Byzantine convention and used ultramarine more lavishly than any chapel before it. It now forms part of a UNESCO site inscribed in 2021.
A euro coin buys ninety seconds of Caravaggio’s light
Caravaggio’s three Saint Matthew canvases, painted 1599–1602 for a French cardinal’s stalled bequest, still hang in San Luigi dei Francesi, lit today by a coin-operated box. The rejected first altarpiece was destroyed in Berlin in 1945.