The 19th century did not do right by Fra Angelico (around 1395-1455). Napoleon’s suppression of Italian monasteries saw the dispersal of works by the Dominican friar, now regarded as one of the pioneering figures of the early Renaissance. Then the Victorians, including none other than Queen Victoria, developed a sentimental and highly influential fascination with aspects of his piety, revering him as a kind of neo-Medieval outlier. This anti-modern Fra Angelico lived on until the second half of the 20th century, when new scholarship and new research techniques began to allow art historians to reconsider and all but reinvent the artist.
Along with his near contemporary Masaccio, Fra Angelico is now regarded as among the first Tuscans to apply the use of linear perspective to fresco and panel painting, and arguably the first to conjure up a dynamic depiction of light. This modernised Fra Angelico is seen as an agent of change rather than a bulwark against it, and 21st-century museum-goers have had some stellar opportunities to take note, first at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2005, then at the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 2019. And this month, in what is set to be the most comprehensive survey of the artist to date, and a culmination of decades of evolving scholarship, Florence is opening a double-venue exhibition of more than 140 works, simply called Fra Angelico.
Born Guido di Pietro, the artist was known in his lifetime as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, and only after his death as Fra Angelico (the angelic friar). His transition from a practitioner of the late Gothic to progenitor of the early Renaissance will be presented in the first half of the show at the Museo di San Marco. Then the thread will move to the Palazzo Strozzi, which, in addition to being Florence’s leading showcase for Modern and contemporary art, has also carved out a niche as a venue of first resort for major Renaissance shows. In 2022 it was Donatello; now it is Fra Angelico, with the Strozzi boasting five reconstructed altarpieces, with constituent panels gathered together from major European and American museums and remote Tuscan collections.
Influences and forebears
The main repository of Fra Angelico’s work, San Marco already houses dozens of the artist’s mature frescoes, often intended to decorate the friars’ upper-floor dormitory cells. For the show, lower-floor galleries will feature works by his artistic influences and forebears, like the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and late Gothic masters Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco.
Masaccio’s early 1420s work, the San Giovenale Triptych, on loan to San Marco from a small museum in greater Florence, will allow for a direct comparison with Fra Angelico’s early 1420s San Pietro Martire Triptych, which recently underwent conservation. In the early 1430s Fra Angelico finished Lorenzo Monaco’s Strozzi Altarpiece, begun a decade earlier and here part of the Palazzo Strozzi display. His main deposition scene, marked by a range of emotion in the near-sculptural figures, now seems like a Renaissance retort to Lorenzo’s Gothic figures in 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 usually on view in San Marco are being moved to the Strozzi, notably the immense main panel of the San Marco Altarpiece, showing an enthroned Virgin and Christ child. The work, originally intended for the complex’s high altar, was disassembled in the early 19th century and now comprises 18 separate panels, 17 of which will be on view together in Florence. This means that for the first time in over two centuries, it will be possible to see how the majesty of the main scene plays off images in the predella, while also allowing for fuller comparisons with other works by the artist from the same period. The predella’s central image, The Entombment of Christ (1438-40), on loan from Munich, has an ethereal Christ figure and sublime pathos that echo a celebrated resurrection fresco back at San Marco, The Transfiguration (1438-39).
The San Marco Altarpiece was disassembled in the early 19th century and now comprises 18 separate panels, 17 of which will be on view together in Florence
Putting altarpiece predellas back together can take years of scholarship and more than a little detective work. The curator of the show, Carl Brandon Strehlke, says the order of the San Marco Altarpiece predella panels—which tell stories in chronological order about Medici namesakes, Saints Cosmas and Damian—was easy to figure out. But deciding exactly where to place the five predella panels of the Franciscan Triptych (1428-29), showing scenes from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, was another matter. Originally painted on a single piece of wood, the panels were cut up and sold off, ending up at the Vatican and two museums in Germany. In spite of this scattering, “we were able to get everything x-radiographed”, Strehlke says, thus the mystery of the original woodgrain—and therefore the correct order of the images—was solved.
Another great mystery of the show: how did Strehlke and the curatorial team manage to get so many of the world’s most important museums to loan some of their most important Renaissance works? Many of the core altarpiece panels were already in Florence, Strehlke explains, which proved to be a “winning argument”. And it turns out that no one wants to be cast as the spoiler. “When you have a big monographic show like this,” he says, “other lending institutions like to participate.”
• Fra Angelico, Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, 26 September-25 January 2026
