Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico, Deposition of Christ, between 1423 and 1432, Museo di San Marco, Florence.
Organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the Ministero della Cultura – Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Toscana and the Museo di San Marco, this exhibition explores Fra Angelico’s art, development and influence and his relation to painters such as Lorenzo Monaco, Masaccio, and Filippo Lippi, as well as sculptors like Lorenzo Ghiberti, Michelozzo, and Luca della Robbia. It ist he first major exhibition in Florence dedicated to the artist exactly seventy years after the monographic show of 1955.
Renowned for a style that evolved from a late Gothic legacy while embracing the principles of the emerging Renaissance, Fra Angelico (Guido di Piero, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole; Vicchio di Mugello c. 1395– Rome 1455) created paintings celebrated for their mastery of perspective and light, shaping an unprecedented and innovative relationship between figures and space. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore extraordinary artistic vision of this friar painter deeply rooted in religious devotion, centred on a reflection of the sacred in relation to the human.
The exhibition brings together more than 140 works of art across the two venues that include paintings, drawings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts from leading institutions such as the Louvre in Paris, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vatican Museums, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and numerous libraries, churches, and collections both in Italy and internationally.
The result of over four years of preparation, the project has enabled an undertaking of exceptional scholarly and cultural importance, thanks also to an extensive campaign of restorations and the singular opportunity to reunite altarpieces that were disassembled and dispersed over two hundred years ago.