LONDON, ENGLAND.-'Reunions', a small in-focus exhibition, celebrates recent acquisitions of early Italian paintings to the National Gallery's collection and aims to reunite pictures that were once part of the same ensemble. Recent acquisitions of 13th and 14th-century works make the National Gallery's one of the most comprehensive collections of early Italian paintings in the United Kingdom. This exhibition will focus on the acquisition of an Umbrian diptych and works by Cimabue and Bernardo Daddi. The paintings by Cimabue and Daddi will be reunited with panels from the Frick Collection in New York and Christ Church, Oxford, respectively. The two Daddi fragments will be shown together for the first time since at least 1828.

The diptych representing 'The Virgin and Child' and 'The Man of Sorrows' (about 1260), by an unknown Umbrian artist, is of major importance in the history of Christian art. This is the earliest known surviving diptych to show the Virgin and Child with Christ as the Man of Sorrows, articulating a delicate relationship between the two scenes. The two panels were originally hinged to create a portable, book-like object for private devotional use, but from at least 1926 these two panels resided in separate collections, only reunited in 1999 when both pictures were bought by the Gallery.

The exquisite 'Coronation of the Virgin' (about 1340) by Bernardo Daddi, bought by the National Gallery in 2004, is reunited with 'Four Musical Angels' from Christ Church, Oxford. Daddi, one of the most prolific and influential Florentine artists of the first half of the 14th century, may have intended these harmoniously composed paintings to be the central part of a polyptych. In 1961 a German art historian identified the panel from Christ Church, Oxford, as the missing lower panel from 'The Coronation of the Virgin'; these findings were later confirmed by scientific x-ray imaging at the National Gallery.

The third, previously separated pair of pictures is by the 13th-century Italian artist Cimabue. The 'Virgin and Child enthroned with Two Angels' (about 1260-5), discovered in a country house in Suffolk, was acquired by the National Gallery in 2000 following a groundbreaking discovery connecting this beautiful and rare panel to 'The Flagellation of Christ', belonging to the Frick Collection in New York. These rare and delicately executed panels almost certainly formed part of a larger work, probably showing additional scenes from the Passion of Christ.

Reuniting these beautiful and important works will offer visitors the opportunity to consider the original relationship between the single panels, and to explore the question of how they may have looked originally.