Celebrating the Old Master Collections of the National Gallery of Art: Central Italian Painting

David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture series takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this seventh lecture in the series, presented on August 18, David Gariff, senior lecturer, discusses the Gallery’s collection of Italian paintings, considered the most important in America and among the finest and most comprehensive in the world. The collection contains works by some of the greatest Italian painters in art history, including Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Correggio, and Bernardino Luini. All the important regional schools are represented, including Florence, Siena, Venice, and the Lombard tradition in the north. Most important, the National Gallery of Art is home to the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Western Hemisphere—his Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci. In this lecture, Gariff explores the history of central Italian painting from 1300 to 1520 seen through the masterpieces in the Gallery’s permanent collection.