Complete star score: ★★★★★
The works: ★★★★★
The present: ★★★★★
There’s a fascinating work within the first room (Museo di San Marco) of this magnificent two-venue present devoted to the early Renaissance grasp, Fra Angelico (round 1395-1455). It’s the Fiesole Altarpiece, initially put in on the excessive altar of San Domenico within the Tuscan hilltop city of Fiesole within the early 1420s, and on mortgage from the church. Among the many artist’s earliest works and one in every of his most heavenly achievements, its making coincided with Guido di Piero’s entry into the Dominican order in Fiesole, the place, upon taking his vows, he grew to become Fra Giovanni, a easy mendicant friar. He introduced with him such angelic talent as an expert painter that, collectively together with his ethical advantage, it later earned him the sobriquet Fra Angelico.
He combines spatial gymnastics with a theologian’s readability
The Fiesole Altarpiece was particularly outstanding for its wonderful predella panels, depicting some 200 holy and non secular figures, now housed within the Nationwide Gallery in London and among the many few important loans that this exhibition was unable to safe. The principle panel, right here serving for example Fra Angelico’s “beginnings”, is notable for the modernising intervention of the painter Lorenzo di Credi, who in 1501 changed the unique gold floor with an expansive panorama. Lorenzo’s efforts—which additionally concerned the imposition of a classicising structure and a squaring and slight enlarging of the panel to take away its Gothic arches—throw Fra Angelico’s central figures into sharp aid. Devoid of their unifying gold floor, and with their parrot-hued draperies restored, they grow to be cut-outs. Because the scholar Timothy Verdon noticed, they seem like “actors on the fallacious set, or historic statues in a contemporary parlour”.
The principle part of the Fiesole Altarpiece, painted by Fra Angelico round 1420-23 and modified by Lorenzo di Credi in 1501 © Foto Giusti Claudio; Firenze
4 years within the making and that includes unprecedented loans from greater than 70 museums and 28 newly conserved works, this main exhibition units out to current probably the most full image of Fra Angelico up to now, whereas difficult the notion that the artist was in any approach archaic. It’s a collaboration between two venues, the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, that are about quarter-hour’ stroll away from each other. The Museo di San Marco, a former Dominican convent the place Fra Angelico labored, is residence to the artist’s celebrated frescoes, which adorn the monks’ cells and corridors of the dormitory, along with the chapter home and the cloister of Sant’Antonio.
The curators are to be particularly congratulated for gathering and reassembling so a lot of Fra Angelico’s main altarpieces—most notably the San Marco Altarpiece (1438-43)—reuniting dispersed predella panels and framing ornamental parts (many looted through the Napoleonic period) to disclose the sheer scale and scope of Fra Angelico’s invention. That is evident notably in the best way that Fra Angelico rises to the narrative calls for of the predella scenes, combining a theologian’s readability with appreciable spatial gymnastics, and within the subtle tooling and embellishment of gold, which emanates in addition to displays mild.
Sacred separateness
A lot of the altarpieces are offered within the brilliant ethereal rooms of the Palazzo Strozzi—one blazing symphony of gold and treasured pigment after the following— which, unusually, emphasises the “cut-out” high quality of Fra Angelico’s figures, delineated by their beautiful raiment, individualised options and gilded halos. There’s a sense of bodily detachment in addition to non secular self-containment, which echoes the present’s deal with the bodily carpentry and association of the altarpieces themselves.
The cut-out high quality is purposefully to the fore in a placing room dedicated to the silhouetted crucifix, the place the aping of polychrome sculpture on a big scale, notably in Christ’s anatomy, is achieved by sturdy modelling that displays Masaccio’s affect. Right here, one longs for the shadowy apse or the sparkle of candlelight that might have made these large figures by Fra Angelico and his fellow Florentine artists Lorenzo Monaco and Pesellino materialise.
The exhibition is principally organised by theme and is vaguely chronological. The chance to maneuver works from the Museo di San Marco to the Palazzo Strozzi is worthy of word, not least within the palazzo’s opening room, which is dedicated to the Strozzi household’s sepulchral chapel in Florence’s Santa Trinita. Fra Angelico’s dazzling Santa Trinita Altarpiece (Deposition from the Cross) (1429-32) normally the centrepiece of the Museo di San Marco, stops guests to the palazzo of their tracks, presenting a imaginative and prescient of Florence as the brand new Jerusalem.
Artistically, Florence was then on the turning level of the courtly Worldwide Gothic fashion, exemplified by older friends corresponding to Masolino and Gentile da Fabriano (whose 1423 Adoration of the Magi was additionally commissioned for the Strozzi chapel), and the extra classicising fashion ushered in by Fra Angelico’s contemporaries corresponding to Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio.
The goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti will be seen because the bridge between the 2 kinds, embodied within the majestic Linaioli Tabernacle (1432-33), on which he and Fra Angelico labored; Ghiberti offered the gilt and polychromed marble body and presumably fashions in wax or clay for Fra Angelico and his assistants to make use of to convey quantity and substance. As a fixture, the tabernacle can’t be moved from San Marco (it was initially made for the guildhall of the Florentine linen and rag-dealers). Essentially considered in isolation, its painterly layering of luxurious gold materials, musical angels and monumental male saints overwhelms.
Mocking of Christ with the Virgin and Saint Dominic will be seen on the wall of one of many dormitory cells within the Convent of San Marco Courtesy Ministero della Cultura
In opposition to this backdrop of affect and collaboration, Fra Angelico emerges as a “courtly” artist, reasonably than a “revolutionary”, however he’s additionally one who served the celestial courtroom reasonably than the earthly counterparts that Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Angelico’s pupil and collaborator Benozzo Gozzoli delighted in.
Nowhere is that this sense of expertise within the service of a divine function extra vivid than within the dormitory of the Convent of San Marco, which occupies the primary flooring of the constructing designed by the Florentine architect Michelozzo and bankrolled by the ruling Medici. Every of the 44 cells incorporates frescoes executed by Fra Angelico and his assistants within the early 1440s, together with the personal cell to which Cosimo de’ Medici retreated. Right here, the artist achieves an virtually minimalist naturalism whereas conjuring visions that appear to materialise out of mere plaster. With every fresco lit by a modest window and constrained by a restricted palette, the miracle of Fra Angelico’s artwork is made palpable.
Fra Angelico, Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, till 25 January 2026Curators: Carl Brandon Strehlke with Stefano Casciu and Angelo TartuferiTickets: €16 (concessions obtainable)
What the opposite critics mentioned
Jason Farago, writing in The New York Occasions about this “momentous and inexpressibly lovely” exhibition, runs out of superlatives to explain a “miracle of an occasion”, a “one-time-only alternative to see so many main Fra Angelico altarpieces reassembled”. In the meantime, Matthew Holman, writing in The Florentine, describes the visible impression of the present as “astonishing”, and praises the chance to rediscover an artist who was “extra progressive and cerebral than his widespread popularity for prettiness suggests”.
