When Florence Saved Spinello Aretino

In 1850 a fourteenth-century masterpiece nearly vanished from Florence forever. The triptych by Spinello Aretino, now held at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, was about to be sold abroad through an illicit transaction. Its escape was prevented by the government of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which halted the deal and made the work’s assignment to the museum permanent.

A little-known episode, but a decisive one for the history of Florence’s artistic heritage.

The nineteenth-century art market and the risk of losing a masterpiece

By the mid-nineteenth century, the European antiquarian market looked to Italy as a vast reservoir of medieval and Renaissance works. Many paintings from churches and oratories ended up in foreign private collections, often through less-than-transparent sales.

The triptych by Spinello Aretino — painted on a gold-ground panel, signed and dated 1391 — had been commissioned by the Lucchese merchant Paolino di Simonino di Bonagiunta for the oratory of Sant’Andrea in Lucca. The work depicts the Madonna and Child enthroned with four angels, flanked by Saints Paulinus the bishop, John the Baptist, Andrew, and Matthew, with the prophets Jeremiah and Moses in the roundels above.

In 1850 the painting was the object of an illicit sale that would have led to its export abroad. The intervention of the Tuscan government blocked the operation and established its definitive assignment to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, saving a fundamental piece of Tuscan painting from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

The restoration unveiled at the Galleria dell’Accademia

The nineteenth-century story takes on fresh relevance today: the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence has presented the restoration of the triptych, just completed after work begun in November 2024 and accompanied by a full campaign of diagnostic investigations.

Before the restoration, the work showed surface deposits, degraded fillings, cracks in the wooden support, oxidized varnishes, and overpainting that compromised its legibility. The investigations made it possible to distinguish the original parts from later interventions, identify the preparatory drawing, and analyze the materials and pigments Spinello used.

The most delicate phase was the cleaning, carried out gradually. Removing the altered overpainting brought back to light the original blue of the Madonna’s mantle, made with azurite and natural ultramarine, restoring brilliance and chromatic depth to the work.

The wooden support was also consolidated, with the old crossbars removed and new chestnut-wood crossbars fitted, anchored with elastic mechanisms.

The restoration is now the centerpiece of a temporary exhibition set up in the first-floor rooms devoted to late-fourteenth-century Florentine painting at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

Within the exhibition, a video and in-depth materials recount the different phases of the intervention, giving the public a glimpse of the conservation work that underpins the protection of our heritage.

A story that spans the centuries

In 1850 the task was to keep the triptych from leaving Italy. Today it is to conserve it and return it to the public in its full legibility.

The story of this painting is not only that of a fourteenth-century masterpiece, but that of a collective responsibility spanning the centuries: to defend our heritage, study it, restore it, and make it accessible.

If in the nineteenth century a political intervention was needed to save it, in the twenty-first it is scientific care that secures its future.