The nineteenth century didn’t do proper by Fra Angelico (round 1395-1455). Napoleon’s suppression of Italian monasteries noticed the dispersal of works by the Dominican friar, now considered one of many pioneering figures of the early Renaissance. Then the Victorians, together with none aside from Queen Victoria, developed a sentimental and extremely influential fascination with elements of his piety, revering him as a type of neo-Medieval outlier. This anti-modern Fra Angelico lived on till the second half of the twentieth century, when new scholarship and new analysis strategies started to permit artwork historians to rethink and all however reinvent the artist.
Alongside together with his close to up to date Masaccio, Fra Angelico is now considered among the many first Tuscans to use using linear perspective to fresco and panel portray, and arguably the primary to conjure up a dynamic depiction of sunshine. This modernised Fra Angelico is seen as an agent of change moderately than a bulwark in opposition to it, and Twenty first-century museum-goers have had some stellar alternatives to take observe, first on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York in 2005, then on the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 2019. And this month, in what is about to be essentially the most complete survey of the artist to this point, and a end result of a long time of evolving scholarship, Florence is opening a double-venue exhibition of greater than 140 works, merely known as Fra Angelico.
Born Guido di Pietro, the artist was identified in his lifetime as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, and solely after his loss of life as Fra Angelico (the angelic friar). His transition from a practitioner of the late Gothic to progenitor of the early Renaissance can be introduced within the first half of the present on the Museo di San Marco. Then the thread will transfer to the Palazzo Strozzi, which, along with being Florence’s main showcase for Fashionable and up to date artwork, has additionally carved out a distinct segment as a venue of first resort for main Renaissance reveals. In 2022 it was Donatello; now it’s Fra Angelico, with the Strozzi boasting 5 reconstructed altarpieces, with constituent panels gathered collectively from main European and American museums and distant Tuscan collections.
Influences and forebears
The principle repository of Fra Angelico’s work, San Marco already homes dozens of the artist’s mature frescoes, typically meant to embellish the friars’ upper-floor dormitory cells. For the present, lower-floor galleries will function works by his creative influences and forebears, just like the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and late Gothic masters Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco.
Masaccio’s early 1420s work, the San Giovenale Triptych, on mortgage to San Marco from a small museum in higher Florence, will enable for a direct comparability with Fra Angelico’s early 1420s San Pietro Martire Triptych, which lately underwent conservation. Within the early 1430s Fra Angelico completed Lorenzo Monaco’s Strozzi Altarpiece, begun a decade earlier and right here a part of the Palazzo Strozzi show. His foremost deposition scene, marked by a variety of emotion within the near-sculptural figures, now looks like a Renaissance retort to Lorenzo’s Gothic figures within the pilasters and predella.
The San Marco fresco The Transfiguration (1438-39) from the exhibition Courtesy of Ministero della Cultura, Direzione Regionale Musei Nazionali Toscana/Museo di San Marco
Some works often on view in San Marco are being moved to the Strozzi, notably the immense foremost panel of the San Marco Altarpiece, displaying an enthroned Virgin and Christ baby. The work, initially meant for the advanced’s excessive altar, was disassembled within the early nineteenth century and now includes 18 separate panels, 17 of which can be on view collectively in Florence. Because of this for the primary time in over two centuries, it will likely be doable to see how the majesty of the primary scene performs off pictures within the predella, whereas additionally permitting for fuller comparisons with different works by the artist from the identical interval. The predella’s central picture, The Entombment of Christ (1438-40), on mortgage from Munich, has an ethereal Christ determine and stylish pathos that echo a celebrated resurrection fresco again at San Marco, The Transfiguration (1438-39).
The San Marco Altarpiece was disassembled within the early nineteenth century and now includes 18 separate panels, 17 of which can be on view collectively in Florence
Placing altarpiece predellas again collectively can take years of scholarship and greater than a bit detective work. The curator of the present, Carl Brandon Strehlke, says the order of the San Marco Altarpiece predella panels—which inform tales in chronological order about Medici namesakes, Saints Cosmas and Damian—was simple to determine. However deciding precisely the place to position the 5 predella panels of the Franciscan Triptych (1428-29), displaying scenes from the lifetime of Saint Francis of Assisi, was one other matter. Initially painted on a single piece of wooden, the panels had been minimize up and bought off, ending up on the Vatican and two museums in Germany. Regardless of this scattering, “we had been capable of get the whole lot x-radiographed”, Strehlke says, thus the thriller of the unique woodgrain—and subsequently the proper order of the pictures—was solved.
One other nice thriller of the present: how did Strehlke and the curatorial staff handle to get so most of the world’s most essential museums to mortgage a few of their most essential Renaissance works? Lots of the core altarpiece panels had been already in Florence, Strehlke explains, which proved to be a “successful argument”. And it seems that nobody needs to be forged because the spoiler. “When you’ve got a giant monographic present like this,” he says, “different lending establishments prefer to take part.”
• Fra Angelico, Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, 26 September-25 January 2026
