As a young man of 19, Prince Albert toured Italy where he developed an interest in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian art. Such works were largely shunned by his contemporaries, who considered them to be 'Gothic' and 'grotesque'. However, the Prince built up a small but significant collection of early Italian and Northern European paintings, housing the majority of these fragile works at the royal family's summer residence Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where the air was much less polluted than in London.

This triptych by Duccio di Buoninsegna is arguably the most important of Prince Albert's acquisitions of this type. It is both the oldest work that the Prince purchased and the first painting by Duccio, an early fourteenth-century Sienese artist, to enter an English collection.