European Painting

The Museum has a small but interesting collection of Italian art from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, donated in 1962 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. These works, mostly tempera on panel paintings with a gold background, represent a decisive phase in the development of European visual arts and they find their continuation in the sixteenth century, a rich and complex period in art history. The Museum keeps Mediterranean, Italian and Spanish works, as well as German, Dutch and Flemish, two separate artistic traditions that are in constant dialog during this century.