Complete star ranking: ★★★★★
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 among 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 turned Fra Giovanni, a easy mendicant friar. He introduced with him such angelic ability as knowledgeable 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 spiritual figures, now housed within the Nationwide Gallery in London and among the many few important loans that this exhibition was unable to safe. The primary panel, right here serving as an 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 turn out to be cut-outs. Because the scholar Timothy Verdon noticed, they appear like “actors on the improper set, or historical statues in a contemporary parlour”.
The primary 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 essentially the most full image of Fra Angelico so far, whereas difficult the notion that the artist was in any method 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 dwelling 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 elements (many looted through the Napoleonic period) to disclose the sheer scale and scope of Fra Angelico’s invention. That is evident significantly in the way in which 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
Many of the altarpieces are introduced within the shiny 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 attractive raiment, individualised options and gilded halos. There’s a sense of bodily detachment in addition to religious self-containment, which echoes the present’s concentrate on the bodily carpentry and association of the altarpieces themselves.
The cut-out high quality is purposefully to the fore in a putting room dedicated to the silhouetted crucifix, the place the aping of polychrome sculpture on a big scale, significantly in Christ’s anatomy, is achieved by way of sturdy modelling that displays Masaccio’s affect. Right here, one longs for the shadowy apse or the glint of candlelight that might have made these big 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 be aware, 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) often 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 akin 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 akin to Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio.
The goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti will be seen because the bridge between the 2 types, 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 seen 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
Towards this backdrop of affect and collaboration, Fra Angelico emerges as a “courtly” artist, fairly than a “revolutionary”, however he’s additionally one who served the celestial courtroom fairly 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 goal extra vivid than within the dormitory of the Convent of San Marco, which occupies the primary ground of the constructing designed by the Florentine architect Michelozzo and bankrolled by the ruling Medici. Every of the 44 cells comprises frescoes executed by Fra Angelico and his assistants within the early 1440s, together with the non-public cell to which Cosimo de’ Medici retreated. Right here, the artist achieves an nearly 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 accessible)
What the opposite critics mentioned
Jason Farago, writing in The New York Instances about this “momentous and inexpressibly stunning” 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 affect of the present as “astonishing”, and praises the chance to rediscover an artist who was “extra progressive and cerebral than his common status for prettiness suggests”.
