Florence reassesses Fra Angelico

Florence (Italy). Unheard of for seventy years in Italy. Since 1955, it has not been possible to admire so many works by the Dominican painter and monk Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole (c. 1395-1455), better known as Fra Angelico or Beato Angelico in the peninsula since his beatification in 1982 by John Paul II who proclaimed him patron saint of artists two years later. The retrospective dedicated to him in Florence will be a landmark. Like the one organized seven decades ago, the exhibition which pays tribute to him is spread over two locations. At the time, it was the Vatican and the Museum of San Marco in Florence, a former convent where Fra Angelico lived and worked. It is from this essential place to evoke this artist that the exhibition begins, which then continues at Palazzo Strozzi, located just a few meters away.

The 1955 meeting marked the rehabilitation of Fra Angelico thanks to the efforts of the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan. That of 2025 intends to ratify the redefinition of his role since the 1990s. The artist monk is not only the “Angelic Painter” of piety at the twilight of Gothic art, but a fundamental protagonist of the dawn of the Renaissance. In 1970, Elsa Morante, in an essay dedicated to her and in which she questioned her place in “the revolution in the arts during the Renaissance”wondered if Fra Angelico had participated in the humanist revolution of the Quattrocento.

“We would like to affirm that yes”replies Carl Brandon Strehlke, curator emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the organizers of this retrospective with Stefano Casciu, regional director of the National Museums of Tuscany, and Angelo Tartuferi, former director of the Museum of San Marco. It therefore begins at the San Marco Museum which houses the largest collection of works by Fra Angelico. Most of them were transferred to Palazzo Strozzi for the occasion, but there you can admire in situ the frescoes of the forty-three monks’ cells decorated by the Dominican painter, between 1438 and 1443. Designed for the meditation of the brothers, these decorations culminate with the fresco of theAnnunciationconsidered the artist’s most emblematic work.

Reconstruction of the Pala di San Marco

More than 140 others are gathered at Palazzo Strozzi from 70 museums and international collections including the Uffizi Gallery, the Vatican Museums and the British royal collections. The exhibition required more than four years of work to achieve a true technical feat: reconstituting the Pala di San Marco, commissioned by Cosimo de Medici for the high altar of the Florentine convent church, dismantled and dispersed following the suppression of religious orders by Napoleon. Seventeen of its eighteen panels are brought together for the first time in more than two centuries, thanks to exceptional loans from the Louvre, the National Gallery in Washington, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

The exhibition route is structured into eight chronological and thematic sections, tracing the stylistic evolution of the painter, from his beginnings in Florence to his Roman period (1445-1455). But the heart of the retrospective are the large commissions for altarpieces, essential in the work of Fra Angelico. A discreet and elegant scenography underlines the innovative character of the altarpieces of Fiesole, of Bosco ai Frati, but above all the Descent from the Cross said Strozzimain panel of the Altarpiece of Santa Trìnita made with Lorenzo Monaco (1370-1425). It has been the subject of meticulous restoration work (like around thirty works presented) and welcomes the visitor who then becomes aware of the artistic rupture to which Fra Angelico fully contributed. The use of linear perspective to organize the space, the unprecedented realism of the characters, the treatment of the drapes with a subtle chiaroscuro giving them a sculptural density far removed from the traditional slender forms of late Gothic… Fra Angelico has adopted the stylistic innovations of the new artistic era. He knew how to reconcile them with the chromatic brilliance and the use of gold of the late Gothic which we see in his Madonnas of Humility or his predellas (lower parts of the altarpieces). These small panels illustrate Fra Angelico’s narrative skill, where he applies new discoveries of perspective and light to scenes teeming with detail and daily life. Although the frescoes of the Nicoline Chapel in the Vatican cannot be moved, the exhibition nevertheless focuses on his Roman period (1445-1455) through drawings and preparatory studies of works which bear witness to his work for the sovereign pontiffs Eugene IV and Nicholas V in the service of Christian humanism. It will be difficult after this exhibition not to include Fra Angelico in the circle of founding masters of the Renaissance where his contemporary Masaccio already sits.