di John T. SPIKE
Part I
Since its opening last September, the exhibition, Beato Angelico 2025, has attracted endless streams of visitors to Florence to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with the art of Fra Angelico, the renowned Dominican friar and Early Renaissance painter. The selection of more than 140 paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and other forms of art was made by an international team of art historians headed by Carl Brandon Strehlke, Curator Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, together with co-curators Stefano Casciu, Regional Director of the National Museums of Tuscany, and Angelo Tartuferi, former Director of the Museo di San Marco.
The astonishing accomplishments of Fra Angelico’s career were divided between two historic Florentine venues: seven altarpieces arranged chronologically amidst other masterpieces were on view at the Palazzo Strozzi, a monumental, three-story palace begun in 1489. The second venue, the Museo di San Marco, was a Dominican convent designed in the Renaissance style by the architect Michelozzo on commission from Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder.
Fra Angelico had moved into the San Marco convent in 1436 and lived there for several years as he painted more than 44 frescoes on the ground floor walls and inside the friars’ cells and Cosimo de’ Medici’s own personal cell on the second floor.  Several of Angelico’s illuminated manuscripts were displayed in the Library on the upper floor.
The San Marco Museum’s large room on the ground floor was an ideal space to compare some early works by Angelico, mainly of the 1420s, with contemporary paintings by his formative influences, especially the artists Gherardo Starnina (once known as the “Maestro del Bambino visbo”), Masolino da Panicale and Masaccio. The central door to this gallery was flanked by two paintings of the enthroned Madonna and Child by Masaccio and Fra Angelico, respectively. The comparison provided a fascinating demonstration of Angelico’s response to Masaccio’s early Renaissance naturalism and monumentality learned from Giotto (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).
The great achievement of this spectacular exhibition has been to present a broad survey of Fra Angelico’s glorious career – ranging from the illuminated pages in the Gradual 558 manuscript from San Domenico in Fiesole, ca.1420, to his late The Crucifixion with Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (Harvard Art Museums), datable to 1453-1454, only two years before his death.  Selecting works with well-established attributions has clearly been a primary concern for Carl Brandon Strehlke and the other contributors.  Many of these works were cleaned and restored during the last four years in preparation for this exhibition. As a further encouragement to future scholarship, the Italian organizers supported an energetic effort to locate and re-unite Fra Angelico’s paintings with their original predellas (lower altar panels) long ago dispersed among the world’s museums.
Of particular notice in the massive (440pp) exhibition catalogue are the comments on Fra Angelico’s prominence in the development of the Early Renaissance in Florence, especially in the use of light and perspective. Other points of concentration are the extensive research into the provenance, physical condition, and stylistic developments discernible in the 140 works. All are illustrated in color, often with details, and accompanied by individual texts and some essays including Carl Strehlke’s updated biography of the artist and Angelo Tartuferi’s history of the San Marco Library.
Given the plentitude of original works available for contemplation, it might seem unreasonable to decry omissions. Nevertheless, a few days after the opening, a review in the New York Times raised the issue of whether the exhibition adequately explored the theological content of Fra Angelico’s paintings.  Indeed, through the centuries, from Vasari’s 1550 biography until the present day, many observers of Fra Angelico’s works have considered his Dominican theology to be fundamentally essential to an understanding of his art. Here is an excerpt from the review by Jason Farago, entitled:
“Fra Angelico and the Miracle of Faith Made Visible: A once-in-a-generation exhibition in Italy shows how the Renaissance painter believed something with his whole heart, and then made it manifest.”           Â
(New York Times, October 7, 2025
“The American curator Carl Brandon Strehlke, a veteran of the Philadelphia Museum of Art who’s organized this show, has taken an almost archaeological approach to Angelico. The galleries, and a giant catalog, are thickened with technical details. Storytelling is not its way, biography is scant, and the exclusively religious subject matter does not permit many memes.”
In his journalistic exuberance, Mr Farago was writing in defense of an approach that has prevailed for many years, with ancient roots and codified in modern art history in John Pope-Hennessy’s Fra Angelico, (Phaidon: London, 1952), p. 16:
“The deliberate avoidance of the realistic detail proper to a simple narrative of the [Strozzi] Deposition (Fig. 3), the tender gestures with which the figures in the centre perform their ritual, and the restraint of the spectators, consumed by inner sorrow which finds expression in sympathetic lassitude rather than in rhetoric, are explained by the inscriptions, which lend the painting the character of a homily, rather than a narrative.
John Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, 2nd ed., 1974, p. 3:
 “What cannot be denied is that a golden thread of faith runs through this work. There is no painter whose images are more exactly calculated to encourage meditation and to foster those moral values which lie at the centre of the spiritual life.”
Pope-Hennessy’s 1952 reading of Fra Angelico’s Deposition as, in essence, a visual homily (Christian sermon) placed him in the forefront of the postwar art historical fascination with the iconography, iconology, and allegories in Renaissance painting. [N.B. “Iconography” identifies the subject matter and symbols in art, while “iconology” interprets their philosophical or religious meanings.]
A brief list of the numerous publications in this field – mostly emanating from the Warburg Institute in London – provides the scholarly context of Pope-Hennessy’s bold interpretation:   E.J. Gombrich (1945, 1950, 1956), Wittkower (1949, 1953, 1958), Jean Seznec (1953), Erwin Panofsky (1951, 1953, 1955), Frances Yates (1952-1966), Edgar Wind (1958).
In terms of Fra Angelico studies, Pope-Hennessy’s Fra Angelico was not alone in its recognition of the foundational importance of the artist’s deep knowledge of Dominican theology. Three years later, Giulio Carlo Argan published his indispensable study on this issue, which was distributed worldwide in four languages: Italian, English, French and Spanish.  Giulio Carlo Argan, Fra Angelico and his Time, (Skira: Geneva, 1955), p. 7:
- 7: “His art arose within the complex of trends that shaped 15th- century Florentine art, and logically remained within them, just as its sacred content stemmed directly from the religious doctrines of his day… He himself was very much a man of the Renaissance, a cultural revolution which he sought to enlist in the service of purely religious ends, exalting the humanitarian values of Christianity instead of those attached to classical Antiquity.”
- 16: “Fra Angelico painted as a preacher preaches. He was too practical a theologian to believe [unlike Michelangelo, e.g., Ed.] that God could possibly be contemplated as an abstract entity; the God, saints and angels that he paints appeal at once to any man, for they appear as the familiar figures of our sensory experience… The artist depicts the blissful delights of heaven and, by providing a glimpse of the rewards in store, exhorts the faithful to live holily.”
- 24: “Fra Angelico cannot be described as a narrator in the sense that Gentile da Fabriano had been before him and Benozzo Gozzoli after him… He is a preacher who is fond of varying from exhortation to example, but who never relaxes the taut didactic threads that sustain his sermon.“
Pope-Hennessy’s and Argan’s interpretations of Fra Angelico’s evangelical intensions were encouraged no doubt by the St Peter Preaching the Gospel to St Mark in the Linaioli Tabernacle in San Marco (Fig. 7) This lively predella painting testifies explicitly to the fundamental importance of preaching the Gospel in Christianity.
As a priest in the Dominican order, Fra Angelico was immersed in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Most art historians have assumed that Angelico’s paintings—especially the frescoes in the cells at San Marco—must reflect the influence of Aquinas’s views on Christian images, and yet the specific source is not cited. After some research, I have identified a source in Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Scriptum super libros Sententiarum). In this text, the Dominican saint outlines three essential functions of sacred images — all of which can be said to be characteristic of Angelico’s work: 1) Simplified composition; 2) The Presence of Observers; and 3) A Compositional Harmony, (Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, Distinction 9, Question 1, Article 2, Solution 2.).  Furthermore, in Book III, Distinction 9 of the Commentary, Aquinas stipulated three reasons for the presence of images in Church: 1) For the instruction of the unlettered; 2) To commemorate the mystery of the Annunciation; and 3) To stimulate devotion. All three of these qualities are clearly relevant for Angelico’s sacred paintings, especially the meditative frescoes at San Marco, where they were intended for the private devotions of the friars.
Part II.    Some unobserved motifs in the Strozzi Deposition / Alcuni motifs inosservati nella Deposizione Strozzi.
In 2025 the cleaning and restoration of the Strozzi Deposition (Fig. 3) was completed in time to be exhibited in the Palazzo Strozzi venue of the exhibition Beato Angelico in Florence. Fra Angelico’s Deposition (also known as the Pala di Santa Trinita) was originally commissioned for the Strozzi family chapel inside a sacristy in the church of Santa Trinita in Florence.
Angelo Tartuferi, “Fra Angelico Deposition back on display,” Friendsofflorence.org April 4, 2025,
“The work is unique because for the first time in Western art, the death of Christ is seen not only as a simple visual translation of the sacred scriptures, but as an event to be commented on and interpreted in the context of Christian humanism of the early 15th century.”
John T. Spike, Fra Angelico, (English 1996; Italian, French, German 1997), Â Â Â Â Â Â Â p. 106:
“Fra Angelico’s celebrated Deposition was by no means a straightforward representation of the four Gospel narratives of the taking down of the body of Christ… There are no textual or pictorial precedents for the group of worshipers, at right, who contemplate the event and sagely discuss the crown of thorns and the three nails. Instead of a desolate Golgotha strewn with skulls, as described in the Gospels, Fra Angelico depicted a glorious day in a landscape of infinite serenity. The joyful colors and delicate garden applied by Fra Angelico evoke the concept behind the Italian words Venerdì Santo.”
The insertion of personages not cited in the Bible was Fra Angelico’s way of signaling to the viewer that his painting was not meant as an illustration of the Bible but rather as a spiritual meditation on the meaning of the Passion: Christ sacrificed himself for the salvation of humanity.  The most prominent    member of the group stands in the front row dressed in the long-pleated robe of a learned Florentine. He speaks to the others while showing them the Crown of Thorns, held upright so that it is seen as a perfect circle, and the three Holy Nails which he holds to resemble a V, the shape of an architect’s compass (Fig. 4a).
Knowing Fra Angelico’s knowledge of medieval symbolism enables us to assume that these unusual gestures are neither random nor pointlessly decorative.
In short, the learned teacher is explaining to the others that the Passion was foreseen by God as part of His universal plan for mankind and the world. The circle and the hand-held compass can be found in medieval depictions of the Creation of the universe according to harmonic principles explained in the Book of Wisdom 11:21 (and often cited by St Augustine):
“God, who created all things in number, weight, and measure, arranged the elements in an admirable order” (Fig. 4b).
Symbolic arrangements of the instruments of the Passion are commonplace in Renaissance paintings, although rarely noted by art historians. A Deposition attributed to Fra Angelico, but possibly by a follower, is an extreme example in which the tool for removing the Nails, the Crown of Thorns, three Nails and a hammer, are laid out on a white shroud in the foreground in order to send a message that can be read in different ways (Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b).
Around 1485, Jacopo del Sellaio (1441-1493), a Florentine, painted a particularly intriguing Christ with Instruments of the Passion ( now in Birmingham Museum of Art (Fig. 6c), in which Christ holds up the circular Crown and shows the stigmata wound on his side.
On the ledge in the foreground are seen a sponge, a scourge, and two Nails crossed X, the Greek letter Chi symbolic of Christ.
The opportunity to examine this brightly illuminated Deposition in this exhibition in the Palazzo Strozzi made it possible to notice for the first time that the learned man who explains the symbolism of the circular Crown of thorns has the same facial features as the portrait of St Francis of Assisi in the nearby medallion on the left side of the frame (compare Fig. 4a and Fig. 6b).
Bot the learned man and the St. Francis are teaching the Passion symbols to whoever sees them. It is fitting that St Francis is depicted revealing the stigmata wound in his size as he looks directly at Christ lowered from the Cross. Francis taught in his famous canticle that “Sister Death” was not to be feared: death was but the crucial transition towards the Resurrection, the ultimate aspiration of Christians.
In closing, the spirituality of Angelico’s renderings of Biblical prophets and New Testament saints was already revered during his lifetime and thereafter through the centuries.  In our own time, he has been especially honored by Pope Saint John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła), who beatified the Blessed Angelico in 1982, declaring, “These paintings are his miracles”.
Two years later, during a Mass in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, John Paul II appointed him Blessed Angelico, the universal patron saint of artists.  In his extensive writings about this Renaissance artist, John Paul II describes his paintings as “wonderful homilies on the story of redemption.” Vatican authorities explained that John Paul II’s comparison to “homilies” was meant to evoke the evangelizing power of Fra Angelico’s art.
John T. SPIKE  Firenze 17 Maggio 2026