Florence is hosting the most comprehensive exhibition of Fra Angelico's works to date, featuring more than 140 pieces across two prestigious venues. The double-venue show, simply titled "Fra Angelico," marks a culmination of decades of evolving scholarship and presents a revolutionary understanding of the Dominican friar who lived from around 1395 to 1455.
The 19th century significantly damaged Fra Angelico's artistic legacy through Napoleon's suppression of Italian monasteries, which led to the widespread dispersal of the artist's works. The Victorians, including Queen Victoria herself, later developed a sentimental fascination with his piety, mistakenly revering him as a neo-Medieval outlier rather than recognizing his true innovative spirit. This anti-modern perception of Fra Angelico persisted until the second half of the 20th century, when new scholarship and research techniques allowed art historians to reconsider and essentially reinvent their understanding of the artist.
Modern scholarship now recognizes Fra Angelico, alongside his contemporary Masaccio, as among the first Tuscans to apply linear perspective to fresco and panel painting. He is arguably the first artist to create dynamic depictions of light, establishing him as an agent of change rather than a traditionalist. This modernized understanding has been showcased in stellar exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2005 and the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 2019.
Born Guido di Pietro, the artist was known during his lifetime as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole and only received the name Fra Angelico (the angelic friar) after his death. The Florence exhibition traces his artistic evolution from a practitioner of late Gothic style to a progenitor of the early Renaissance. The first half of the show at the Museo di San Marco presents his transition, while the Palazzo Strozzi continues the narrative with five reconstructed altarpieces featuring constituent panels gathered from major European and American museums as well as remote Tuscan collections.
The Museo di San Marco, which serves as the main repository of Fra Angelico's work, already houses dozens of the artist's mature frescoes that originally decorated the friars' upper-floor dormitory cells. For this exhibition, the museum's lower-floor galleries feature works by his artistic influences and predecessors, including sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and late Gothic masters Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco. The display allows visitors to understand the artistic context that shaped Fra Angelico's revolutionary approach.
A particularly significant comparison is made possible through the display of Masaccio's early 1420s San Giovenale Triptych, on loan from a small museum in greater Florence, alongside Fra Angelico's early 1420s San Pietro Martire Triptych, which recently underwent conservation. In the early 1430s, Fra Angelico completed Lorenzo Monaco's Strozzi Altarpiece, which had been begun a decade earlier. His main deposition scene, characterized by a range of emotions in near-sculptural figures, appears as a Renaissance response to Lorenzo's Gothic figures in the pilasters and predella.
One of the exhibition's most remarkable achievements is the reassembly of the San Marco Altarpiece's main panel, showing an enthroned Virgin and Christ child. Originally intended for the complex's high altar, this masterpiece was disassembled in the early 19th century and now comprises 18 separate panels. For the first time in over two centuries, 17 of these panels will be displayed together in Florence, allowing visitors to appreciate how the majesty of the main scene interacts with images in the predella and enabling fuller comparisons with other works from the same period.
The predella's central image, "The Entombment of Christ" (1438-40), on loan from Munich, features an ethereal Christ figure and sublime pathos that echo the celebrated resurrection fresco "The Transfiguration" (1438-39) back at San Marco. This careful curation demonstrates the interconnected nature of Fra Angelico's artistic vision across different mediums and timeframes.
Reassembling altarpiece predellas requires years of scholarship and considerable detective work, according to exhibition curator Carl Brandon Strehlke. The order of the San Marco Altarpiece predella panels, which chronologically tell stories about Medici namesakes Saints Cosmas and Damian, was relatively straightforward to determine. However, placing the five predella panels of the Franciscan Triptych (1428-29), showing scenes from Saint Francis of Assisi's life, proved more challenging since the panels were originally painted on a single piece of wood before being cut up and sold to different institutions, including the Vatican and two German museums.
Strehlke explained that despite this scattering, the team managed to have everything X-radiographed, which solved the mystery of the original wood grain and therefore the correct order of the images. This technical approach demonstrates how modern conservation science contributes to art historical understanding and exhibition planning.
The curator addressed questions about how the team successfully secured loans of important Renaissance works from major international museums. Strehlke noted that many of the core altarpiece panels were already in Florence, which proved to be a compelling argument for other institutions. Additionally, he observed that museums are reluctant to be seen as spoilers when presented with such significant monographic exhibitions, creating a collaborative atmosphere among lending institutions.
The exhibition represents not only a reunion of scattered masterpieces but also a celebration of how contemporary scholarship has transformed our understanding of one of the early Renaissance's most important figures. By presenting Fra Angelico as an innovative artist rather than a conservative traditionalist, the show offers visitors a chance to see familiar works in an entirely new light while discovering lesser-known pieces that have been separated from their original contexts for centuries.
The "Fra Angelico" exhibition runs from September 26 through January 25, 2026, across both the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco in Florence. This unprecedented gathering of the artist's works promises to be a defining moment in Fra Angelico scholarship and offers art enthusiasts a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of his artistic achievement in his hometown.
