Edited with text by Carl Brandon Strehlke. Text by Stefano Casciu, Marco Mozzo, Angelo Tartuferi.
A glorious publication on the "saintly and excellent" Florentine friar and painter whose religious scenes exemplify Renaissance theories of perspective and humanism
After exploring the language of Gothic painting, the great Tuscan artist Fra Angelico enthusiastically took up the new principles of Renaissance art then emerging in Florence. This volume offers a thorough exploration of the extraordinary talent of this artist, bringing out his capacity for artistic innovation in the service of deep spiritual values. The book also provides a comprehensive assessment of the current state of research on Angelico. Its scholarly significance is further reinforced by the unprecedented reunion of five altarpieces that have been dismantled over the centuries: the San Piero Martire Altarpiece, the San Domenico Altarpiece in Fiesole, the Compagnia di San Francesco Altarpiece in Santa Croce, the San Marco Altarpiece and the Perugia Altarpiece. While the main panels have stayed in Italy, the remaining elements are dispersed across museum collections worldwide. The volume includes critical essays, a study of the history of the Museum of San Marco and an analysis of Angelico's frescoes preserved in the Sala del Capitolo, the cloisters and the monastic cells. This is a definitive and indispensable work of reference on the artist. Born in Vicchio di Mugello as Guido di Pietro, Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455) joined the Dominican order as a mendicant friar. He painted several frescoes for the Convent of San Marco in Florence, including the Annunciation, and decorated Cosimo de Medici's personal room in the monastery. In his later years he was called to Rome to decorate chapels for Pope Eugene IV and then Pope Nicholas V. Of his life, Giorgio Vasari wrote: "it is impossible to bestow too much praise on this holy father, who was so humble and modest in all that he did and said and whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety."
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times
Elisabetta Povoledo
[A] blockbuster exhibition.
The Financial Times
Imogen Savage
The altarpiece, and its history, provokes an exercise in looking — to hold in your mind’s eye all the pieces that used to make up the whole. To accept the work, without these parts, for what it is right now. And to view it through Renaissance eyes, building, for a moment, a slower, sensitised relationship to a devotional image, painted for a specific site, instead of through the bombardment and constant contextualisation of images to which our modern eyes have become more accustomed.
The New York Times
Jason Farago
"A once-in-a-generation exhibition in Italy shows how the Renaissance painter believed something with his whole heart, and then made it manifest."
The Wall Street Journal
Cammy Brothers
By including not only the central scenes but reassembling the small, narrative panels—or predellas— typically occupying the lowest register, [the curators have] allowed viewers to see Fra Angelico’s compositions in all their complex, multifaceted splendor.
The Brooklyn Rail
Christian K. Kleinbub
Seen together, the works in this retrospective reveal Fra Angelico’s remarkable range. Adept at every scale and medium, he was anything but a dutiful pedant.
Apollo
Hannah Silver
The artist who emerges from these galleries is possessed of an exacting artistic skill and an omnivorous mind, who continued to refine pictorial solutions across media, location, and workshop structure throughout a 40-year career. Among all this splendour, it’s hard to find room for improvement.
Hyperallergic
Daniel Larkin
The veiled symbolism of the artist's marble and stones has largely flown under the radar, but these mystical depths are too profound to miss out on.
London Review of Books
Anna McGee
To see Angelico’s art in situ, and in such abundance, is an extraordinary experience – and one that is not limited to the exhibition. These works are activated by their context, literally in some cases: several scenes are set in spaces that look like the convent itself, with its restrained classical style and plain stuccoed surfaces, creating a sort of mise en abyme, while in the sacra conversazione Angelico painted in the dormitory corridor, the oblique shadows cast by the columns align with the direction of light from the real windows. You can walk along this corridor and peer into each cell, taking in the frescoes – some austere, some almost lavish – that once guided the devotion of its occupants.
The New York Review of Books
Ingrid G. Rowland
[Fra Angelico's] surviving legacy is radiant enough to brighten our own troubled times.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 456 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $115 GBP £65.00 ISBN: 9791254632505 PUBLISHER: Marsilio Arte AVAILABLE: 1/27/2026 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Marsilio Arte. Edited with text by Carl Brandon Strehlke. Text by Stefano Casciu, Marco Mozzo, Angelo Tartuferi.
A glorious publication on the "saintly and excellent" Florentine friar and painter whose religious scenes exemplify Renaissance theories of perspective and humanism
After exploring the language of Gothic painting, the great Tuscan artist Fra Angelico enthusiastically took up the new principles of Renaissance art then emerging in Florence. This volume offers a thorough exploration of the extraordinary talent of this artist, bringing out his capacity for artistic innovation in the service of deep spiritual values.
The book also provides a comprehensive assessment of the current state of research on Angelico. Its scholarly significance is further reinforced by the unprecedented reunion of five altarpieces that have been dismantled over the centuries: the San Piero Martire Altarpiece, the San Domenico Altarpiece in Fiesole, the Compagnia di San Francesco Altarpiece in Santa Croce, the San Marco Altarpiece and the Perugia Altarpiece. While the main panels have stayed in Italy, the remaining elements are dispersed across museum collections worldwide. The volume includes critical essays, a study of the history of the Museum of San Marco and an analysis of Angelico's frescoes preserved in the Sala del Capitolo, the cloisters and the monastic cells. This is a definitive and indispensable work of reference on the artist.
Born in Vicchio di Mugello as Guido di Pietro, Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455) joined the Dominican order as a mendicant friar. He painted several frescoes for the Convent of San Marco in Florence, including the Annunciation, and decorated Cosimo de Medici's personal room in the monastery. In his later years he was called to Rome to decorate chapels for Pope Eugene IV and then Pope Nicholas V. Of his life, Giorgio Vasari wrote: "it is impossible to bestow too much praise on this holy father, who was so humble and modest in all that he did and said and whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety."
