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Fra Angelico's fresco paintings at the Dominican priory of San Marco are among the best-loved works of Italian art, yet they have been oddly neglected by art historians. In this beautiful book, William Hood analyzes the newly cleaned frescoes at San Marco, setting them against the background of fifteenth-century Florentine artistic, political, cultural, and religious history. Hood discusses the ideals, daily rituals, and pictorial traditions of the Dominican order - especially the reformed or Observant branch to which Fra Angelico belonged. He presents new material on traditions of religious art, altarpiece design and imagery, and the decoration of chapter rooms and cloisters. Hood compares Fra Angelico's work at San Marco to earlier Dominican altarpieces and to his other altarpieces for Dominican buildings in Siena, Pisa, Prato, and Florence, pointing out both the traditional elements and the startling novelty of the San Marco altarpiece. Similarly, by comparing San Marco to other Florentine fresco cycles, he illuminates the originality of the cloister and chapter-house of San Marco. Hood's discussion of San Marco follows an itinerary through the church and adjoining convent buildings, beginning with the high altarpiece and ending with the corridor paintings - especially the exquisite Annunciation in the corridor of the north dormitory. Throughout, he analyzes Angelico's use of color, his technique in fresco and tempera, the way he solved specific visual problems, and how his paintings affected fifteenth-century viewers. This beautiful book will be an important addition to our understanding of fifteenth-century art and of artistic and cultural practices.

With illustrations that demonstrate the rich colors and intense light that imbue Fra Angelico’s work, this book takes a deeper look at one of the master painters of the Florentine Renaissance. One of the great fifteenth-century masters, Fra Angelico was one of several painters who shaped the beginnings of the Florentine Renaissance. Although, because of his occupation as a friar, he is sometimes considered separately from his contemporaries, including Masaccio, Masolino, Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Filippo Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance examines his early works and shows that not only was he a participant in the artistic culture of the time, but also a key innovator. Angelico’s breakthrough work from the mid-1420s, the Prado’s great Annunciation altarpiece, is regarded as the first Renaissance-style altarpiece in Florence. Published to accompany the exhibition “Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance” at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, this book reveals the results of the Prado’s extensive conservation and technological research efforts on The Annunciation, as well as two other recently acquired Angelico paintings: the Alba Madonna and the Funeral of Saint Anthony Abbot. Vividly illustrated and deeply illuminating, this book investigates the origins of the Florentine Renaissance and positions Angelico at the heart of the story.

Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having to be, or bumps on the surface of existence . . . In them, in the form of quasi-stories, are the murmurings and mutterings that have accompanied and still accompany me: outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges, and regrets. —Antonio Tabucchi on The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico transformed painting in Florence with his pioneering images. Reuniting for the first time his four ingenious reliquaries for Santa Maria Novella, this publication explores his celebrated talents as a storyteller and the artistic contributions that shaped a new ideal of painting.

Two fascinating essays reveal how art historians and conservators do their sleuthing. Laurence Kantor explores the attribution of three of his panels that had been at Yale but belong to a triptych at the Getty.

A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems - his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith. In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color. Part of Didi-Huberman's large-scale rethinking of art theory and history, and the first of his books to appear in English translation, Fra Angelico is a fitting introduction to one of the most original and celebrated writers in the world of art history and criticism.