31 May 2023
Acquisitions round-up: rediscovered miniature by female Old Master added to US National Gallery of Art's collection
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has ramped up its purchases of works by women artists in recent years, and this rediscovered gouache-on-vellum miniature of Caterina Angela Pierozzi's Annunciation is among them. Bought from Colnaghi gallery at last year's TEFAF Maastricht fair, it is the only known work by Pierozzi and can be firmly attributed to her ”thanks to an inscription with the artist's name and her Florentine identity. Pierozzi was the second woman after Artemisia Gentileschi to be elected to the world's oldest arts academy, and she enjoyed the patronage of the Medici grand duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere, a leading supporter of female artists. This miniature could also have been a Medici commission. Its painstakingly rendered composition derives from a supposedly miraculous fresco then under the care of the Medici family in Florence's Basilica della Santissima Annunziata.
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