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<\/p>\nTotal star rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
The works: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
The show: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
There is a fascinating work in the first room (Museo di San Marco) of this magnificent two-venue show dedicated to the early Renaissance master, Fra Angelico (around 1395-1455). It is the Fiesole Altarpiece, originally installed on the high altar of San Domenico in the Tuscan hilltop town of Fiesole in the early 1420s, and on loan from the church. Among the artist\u2019s earliest works and one of his most heavenly achievements, its making coincided with Guido di Piero\u2019s entry into the Dominican order in Fiesole, where, upon taking his vows, he became Fra Giovanni, a simple mendicant friar. He brought with him such angelic skill as a professional painter that, together with his moral virtue, it later earned him the sobriquet Fra Angelico.<\/p>\n
He combines spatial gymnastics with a theologian\u2019s clarity<\/p>\n
The Fiesole Altarpiece was especially remarkable for its glorious predella panels, depicting some 200 holy and religious figures, now housed in the National Gallery in London and among the few significant loans that this exhibition was unable to secure. The main panel, here serving to illustrate Fra Angelico\u2019s \u201cbeginnings\u201d, is notable for the modernising intervention of the painter Lorenzo di Credi, who in 1501 replaced the original gold ground with an expansive landscape. Lorenzo\u2019s efforts\u2014which also involved the imposition of a classicising architecture and a squaring and slight enlarging of the panel to remove its Gothic arches\u2014throw Fra Angelico\u2019s central figures into sharp relief. Devoid of their unifying gold ground, and with their parrot-hued draperies restored, they become cut-outs. As the scholar Timothy Verdon observed, they look like \u201cactors on the wrong set, or ancient statues in a modern parlour\u201d.<\/p>\n
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The main section of the Fiesole Altarpiece, painted by Fra Angelico around 1420-23 and modified by Lorenzo di Credi in 1501 \u00a9 Foto Giusti Claudio; Firenze<\/p>\n
Four years in the making and featuring unprecedented loans from more than 70 museums and 28 newly conserved works, this major exhibition sets out to present the most complete picture of Fra Angelico to date, while challenging the notion that the artist was in any way archaic. It is a collaboration between two venues, the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, which are about 15 minutes\u2019 walk away from one another. The Museo di San Marco, a former Dominican convent where Fra Angelico worked, is home to the artist\u2019s celebrated frescoes, which adorn the monks\u2019 cells and corridors of the dormitory, together with the chapter house and the cloister of Sant\u2019Antonio.<\/p>\n
The curators are to be especially congratulated for gathering and reassembling so many of Fra Angelico\u2019s major altarpieces\u2014most notably the San Marco Altarpiece (1438-43)\u2014reuniting dispersed predella panels and framing decorative components (many looted during the Napoleonic era) to reveal the sheer scale and scope of Fra Angelico\u2019s invention. This is evident particularly in the way that Fra Angelico rises to the narrative demands of the predella scenes, combining a theologian\u2019s clarity with considerable spatial gymnastics, and in the sophisticated tooling and embellishment of gold, which emanates as well as reflects light.<\/p>\n
Sacred separateness<\/p>\n
Most of the altarpieces are presented in the bright airy rooms of the Palazzo Strozzi\u2014one blazing symphony of gold and precious pigment after the next\u2014 which, strangely, emphasises the \u201ccut-out\u201d quality of Fra Angelico\u2019s figures, delineated by their gorgeous raiment, individualised features and gilded halos. There is a sense of physical detachment as well as spiritual self-containment, which echoes the show\u2019s focus on the physical carpentry and arrangement of the altarpieces themselves.<\/p>\n
The cut-out quality is purposefully to the fore in a striking room devoted to the silhouetted crucifix, where the aping of polychrome sculpture on a large scale, particularly in Christ\u2019s anatomy, is achieved through robust modelling that reflects Masaccio\u2019s influence. Here, one longs for the shadowy apse or the flicker of candlelight that would have made these giant figures by Fra Angelico and his fellow Florentine artists Lorenzo Monaco and Pesellino materialise.<\/p>\n
The exhibition is mainly organised by theme and is vaguely chronological. The opportunity to move works from the Museo di San Marco to the Palazzo Strozzi is worthy of note, not least in the palazzo\u2019s opening room, which is devoted to the Strozzi family\u2019s sepulchral chapel in Florence\u2019s Santa Trinita. Fra Angelico\u2019s dazzling Santa Trinita Altarpiece (Deposition from the Cross) (1429-32) usually the centrepiece of the Museo di San Marco, stops visitors to the palazzo in their tracks, presenting a vision of Florence as the new Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
Artistically, Florence was then at the turning point of the courtly International Gothic style, exemplified by older peers such as Masolino and Gentile da Fabriano (whose 1423 Adoration of the Magi was also commissioned for the Strozzi chapel), and the more classicising style ushered in by Fra Angelico\u2019s contemporaries such as Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio.<\/p>\n
The goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti can be seen as the bridge between the two styles, embodied in the majestic Linaioli Tabernacle (1432-33), on which he and Fra Angelico worked; Ghiberti provided the gilt and polychromed marble frame and possibly models in wax or clay for Fra Angelico and his assistants to use to convey volume and substance. As a fixture, the tabernacle cannot be moved from San Marco (it was originally made for the guildhall of the Florentine linen and rag-dealers). Necessarily viewed in isolation, its painterly layering of luxurious gold fabrics, musical angels and monumental male saints overwhelms.<\/p>\n
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Mocking of Christ with the Virgin and Saint Dominic can be seen on the wall of one of the dormitory cells in the Convent of San Marco Courtesy Ministero della Cultura<\/p>\n
Against this backdrop of influence and collaboration, Fra Angelico emerges as a \u201ccourtly\u201d artist, rather than a \u201crevolutionary\u201d, but he is also one who served the celestial court rather than the earthly counterparts that Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Angelico\u2019s pupil and collaborator Benozzo Gozzoli delighted in.<\/p>\n
Nowhere is this sense of talent in the service of a divine purpose more vivid than in the dormitory of the Convent of San Marco, which occupies the first floor of the building designed by the Florentine architect Michelozzo and bankrolled by the ruling Medici. Each of the 44 cells contains frescoes executed by Fra Angelico and his assistants in the early 1440s, including the private cell to which Cosimo de\u2019 Medici retreated. Here, the artist achieves an almost minimalist naturalism while conjuring visions that seem to materialise out of mere plaster. With each fresco lit by a modest window and constrained by a limited palette, the miracle of Fra Angelico\u2019s art is made palpable.<\/p>\n