15 Mar-6 July 2008. Wonderful Sienese paintings, preserved in the Lindenau Museum of Altenburg, are brought back temporarily to their place of origin for the first time. This charming exhibition is curated by Miklos Boskovits and Johannes Tripps and displays important as well as lesser known paintings, allowing the public to discover new aspects of the Sienese art.

Since the mid-19th century the Lindenau Museum of Altenburg, a small town in the German state of Thuringia, has held a precious collection of paintings by Italian masters from the 13th-16th centuries. They were in the private collection of Baron Bernhard August von Lindenau (1779-1854), who bought these works by Sienese painters, many of whom had fallen out of favour at the time, and then donated them to his native town around 1850.

Some of the 180 works on display are by Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Perugino and others. Among the great Sienese artists on show are Guido da Siena, the predecessor of Duccio; Pietro Lorenzetti and Lippo Memmi from the early 14th century; Giovanni di Paolo and Matteo di Giovanni of the late Gothic and Renaissance periods; the mannerist Domenico Beccafumi. Over 50 paintings from the Lindenau Museum are displayed next to others by the same artists held at the Complesso Museale and at the Pinacoteca Nazionale.