This horizontal painting is made up of three parts: in the center square panel, a woman reclines under a wooden shelter set into a rocky cave, which is surrounded by angels, and narrower wings to either side are each occupied by a standing man. All the people have pale skin, which is tinged with faint green. The three panels are joined with a gold frame, and the gold background behind the central scene and the men in the side panels are covered with a noticeable network of cracks. In the central panel, a cobalt-blue robe nearly envelopes the reclining woman’s body; this is Mary. It covers her head and falls open where she crosses her wrists over her chest to show a pink garment underneath. A flat gold halo encircles her head ,and her body is surrounded by a field of crimson red, almost like an aura. She rests under a wooden structure with a pitched roof, which is surrounded by craggy, barren rock. A swaddled infant lies in a rectangular, tray-like manger. The infant’s head is also surrounded by a gold halo. Fine gold rays emanate down into the structure from a star just above the peak of the roof. A bull and a donkey look down at the baby from the far side of the manger. The interior of the structure behind them is black. In a smaller scale, two women wash a haloed infant in a tub in front of the rocky cave near the lower left corner of this panel. A man with a white beard and hair sits to our left of Mary, holding a pink cloak at his throat and looking toward the infant. Above and around the rocks, seven winged and haloed angels cluster on each side. One angel to the right presents a scroll with black writing to two men accompanied by a dog and several sheep in the lower right. The man in the panel to the left, Isaiah, has a gray beard and long, wavy hair, and he wears a lilac-purple cloak draped over a coral-orange robe. In his right hand, on our left, he holds an unfurled scroll with large black lettering. His other hand is raised with one finger pointing upward. He looks to our left, away from the central scene. On the right, Ezekiel, echoes Isaiah's pose. Ezekiel holds an open scroll with his left hand, on our right, and his other hand is raised. He also wears a coral-colored robe, but his is overlaid with a blue cloak. His receding hair is short and brown, as is his beard. Like Isaiah, he takes up most of the height of the panel and gazes to our left, toward the central panel.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, 1308-1311, tempera on single poplar panel, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.8

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Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

The National Gallery of Art’s collection of Italian paintings is considered the most important in America and among the finest and most comprehensive in the world. This part of the collection holds works by artists who were among the most influential Italian painters in all of art history, for example, Giotto and Duccio. In the case of the great Sienese master, the Gallery is the only institution in the United States to own two panels from Duccio’s monumental masterpiece, the Maestà. Paintings by Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, Paolo Veneziano, Pietro Lorenzetti, Agnolo Gaddi, and other luminaries make the Gallery’s holdings highly significant for all those who study pre-Renaissance art in Italy. More than a decade in the making, this catalog offers a fresh examination of these works.

To provide the most authoritative scholarship on the earliest paintings in the collection—which has not been published in its entirety since the 1979 Catalogue of Italian Paintings by Fern Rusk Shapley—the Gallery turned to one of the leading historians of early Italian art, Miklós Boskovits. Each entry is conceived as a small monograph, an explanatory roadmap of a painter’s entire career. Similarly, the bibliography provided for each painting includes every significant citation. The history of ownership is also given in greater detail than heretofore, and all exhibitions in which a work appeared are included, because of the increasing importance of exhibitions for art historical investigation.

The paintings in this catalog are generally components of greater assemblages. Some are small works painted for private devotion; others are fragments from multipaneled altarpieces. An effort has been made, therefore, to suggest the original context for these works through schematic reconstructions, which will help users of the catalog understand the panels’ original purpose and meaning.

This catalog represents the fortunate confluence of two interrelated strands: it is an encounter between the most refined and consequential assembly of early Italian paintings in this country, ranking among the greatest collections of such material anywhere outside of Italy, and the most original and influential scholar of this material, Miklós Boskovits, a man who defined many of the canonical presumptions on which the modern study of the period is based.


—Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator and Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery, from “In Memoriam: Miklós Boskovits”

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In this black and white horizontal photograph, people and horse-drawn carriages travel along and cross a rain-slicked, urban street. The photograph is roughly divided in half horizontally so the lower half shows a the wet pavement of a wide intersection, momentarily clear of people, where two streets meet in a T intersection. The upper half shows shops and buildings along a tree-lined street at the corner to our left, and along the long, cross street to our right. On the corner, clothing and other wares are displayed outside under an awning , while another display is covered over with a tarp. There are about ten people are on foot crossing the street toward us, while several horse-drawn carriages with large, spoked wheels, driven by caped and top-hatted men, pass through or are parked alongside the curb on the far side of the street. Some of the pedestrians hold up dark umbrellas, while only one man, without an umbrella, crosses the street walking away from us. All of the men wear dark suits and hats. The one woman crossing with the group wears a long skirt and matching thigh-length coat over a contrasting buttoned bodice. She holds up her skirts in one hand and her umbrella in the other. At the far corner, several tall multi-paneled kiosks with domed tops are papered with posters. Across the street is an uninterrupted row of buildings and shops with rows of shuttered windows above. A small triangular slice of sky can be seen between the building at the left and the trees lining the street; its reflection is mirrored on the wet street.

Scholarly Series:  Alfred Stieglitz Key Set

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945