In 2006 the city of Florence leased three floors of the Palazzo Strozzi to a private consortium of Tuscan banks for the creation of a public exhibition space. Centrally located near the site of the city’s ancient forum (Florence began life as a Roman military camp), the enormous palazzo was built between 1489 and 1538 for the Strozzi, a dynasty of Renaissance bankers, and designed as a challenge to the Medici, their inveterate enemies. Under its first director, the Anglo-Canadian James Bradburne, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi quickly claimed a special place in Florentine cultural life, not least because the irrepressibly imaginative Bradburne threw open its ground floor to anyone passing by.

The idyll ended in 2014, when the institution’s governing body decided to shift its focus, not without input from the former mayor of Florence and newly elected prime minister, Matteo Renzi, then at the crest of his brash popularity. Bradburne’s Italian-born successor, Arturo Galansino, appointed in 2015, has faithfully and competently fulfilled an evident mandate to bring in more contemporary artists, cut costs, and raise funds, but the madcap spirit of the place and, ironically, the connection with Florence went missing in the process. “Contemporary art” mostly means international art, whereas many of Bradburne’s historically oriented exhibitions had tilled, with conspicuous success, the fertile soil of Florentine art, history, and finance, not to mention the persistent impact of these forces on the city’s civic life then and now.

Perhaps this is why, between exhibitions dedicated to the young Georgian artist Andro Eradze and to the Lithuanian American Mark Rothko, Palazzo Strozzi once again turned its attention backward in time to an artist who began to flourish six hundred years ago. Fra Angelico, as the great Tuscan painter is known in the English-speaking world, has been Beato Angelico in Italian ever since Pope John Paul II pronounced him Beatus—blessed, one step away from Catholic sainthood—on October 3, 1982.^* A crucial requirement for beatification is an attested miracle, most often an otherwise inexplicable medical cure obtained by prayer to the candidate, but for this fifteenth-century artist the pontiff declared, reasonably enough, that his paintings, exclusively on religious themes, qualified as miraculous in themselves. And because the largest concentration of those miraculous paintings is now found in Florence, Angelico provided the perfect pretext for an exhibition that would once again tie Palazzo Strozzi to every level of local and national government, from the Commune of Florence to the Region of Tuscany, the Italian Ministry of Culture, and, far from coincidentally, the Catholic Church in the Jubilee Year of 2025. Four years in the making, the exhibition, eventually split between Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, the former Dominican convent where Angelico lived and painted between 1438 and 1450 (the precise dates are unknown), was conceived from the outset as a grand event.

And grand it proved to be, a triumphant display of dazzling color and impeccable, microscopically detailed workmanship. The weighty catalog, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Carl Brandon Strehlke, an American-born resident of Florence, features an international list of contributors. The essays, directed toward fellow specialists, show how little we still know about many phases of the artist’s life, including who taught him; there is much about which the contributors do not agree. Individual entries discuss the adventures worthy of a picaresque novel that many of the paintings on display endured after they were uprooted from their original settings between 1808 and 1810, when Napoleon Bonaparte closed the convents of Tuscany and left residents, buildings, and contents to their fates. These religious establishments fared no better between 1865 and 1870, when Florence served as the capital of the newly created Kingdom of Italy, which was at war with the Papal States of Pope Pius IX. The Dominican convent of San Marco was deconsecrated in the nineteenth century and eventually transformed into the museum that hosted the second half of the Angelico exhibition. Palazzo Strozzi displayed the artist’s more public works; at San Marco we got a bracing glimpse into his austerely disciplined private life.

Strehlke’s opening essay reveals his own awareness that the dazzling surfaces of Angelico’s work can distract our attention from the larger artistic trajectory that took this phenomenally talented painter from the end of the Gothic era to the new, classically inspired spirit of the Renaissance. Angelico, like his younger brother, Benedetto, began his artistic career by painting miniatures for parchment manuscripts, and as his fame spread he continued to devote the same unflagging attention to detail no matter the scale at which he worked, from tiny ornamental letters on the pages of books to the lofty frescoed vaults of the Vatican Palace and Orvieto Cathedral. The lighting in Palazzo Strozzi was carefully directed to reveal that the halos of the friar’s holy figures are not only gilded with pure gold leaf but also ornamented in three dimensions through a variety of inventive techniques: some have been scored by minutely close-set rays or concentric circles so that these infinitesimal ridges create their own rainbow patterns of light and shadow. Some halos sport tiny appliqués of stucco; for others, the plaster-coated wooden panels on which Angelico normally painted have been punched with decorative dots and flowers or engraved with names (“Jesus Christ”, “Saint Thomas Aquinas”) and prayers (“Ave Maria”) in even, perfectly legible script.

The painter and his workshop lavished the same relentless detail on backgrounds of worked gold leaf and elaborate brocades, imitating textiles brought down the Silk Road to central Italy from as far away as China. The figures posed before these sumptuous backgrounds, swathed in vividly painted silks, satins, damasks, and furs, carry themselves in the early panels with an otherworldly elegance and in the later works with a stately, more physical gravitas. A preparatory drawing on parchment for the figure of Christ in his Deposition of Christ from the Cross (also known as the Strozzi altarpiece) is so finely worked that it seems to betray no trace of human effort.

From the outset, working with manuscripts accustomed the young painter to the finest pigments money could buy. Books were so costly and illuminations so small that patrons were willing to supply miniaturists with the best materials, especially for religious texts. Tuscany had its own deposits of mercury for cinnabar red (vermilion) and blue azurite, but the best blue, ultramarine, was made from powdered lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan. The gold Angelico used for gold leaf came from West Africa or present-day Slovakia (then part of Hungary). As his career progressed, his prodigious talents continued to assure him a steady supply of superior material to grind into his exquisite paints. The exhibition’s blaze of gold and rarefied colors, like the textiles he depicted, also testified to the immense wealth that Florentines had amassed in the years since the devastating plague of 1348, but such a glittering display is, in some ways, the least of the angelic friar’s achievements. The paintings, like Angelico’s life, are far more concerned with addressing, and attempting to heal, the discontents created by that wealth: pride, greed, and a brutally unequal society.

The exhibition was hardly the first time that Florentine wealth and power have turned to Fra Angelico in pursuit of redemption; for a man so austere in his personal habits, he had an uncanny ability to move comfortably among the influential magnates, prelates, popes, and scholars he met in his travels between Florence and Rome, the city where he may have created his greatest masterpieces, most of them long gone, and where he died at around the age of sixty in February 1455. These great and powerful patrons may have presented him with the earth’s most precious pigments for his palette and prestigious destinations for his finished work, but they could never buy the man himself. By the time he joined the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, in his mid-twenties sometime between 1418 and 1423, his superiors had long since realized that his paintings preached sermons as powerful as any spoken word, just as Pope John Paul II recognized them five centuries later as miracles.

Despite the supernal delicacy of his paintings, the angelic friar was no otherworldly dreamer. In his studio, lay artists worked alongside Dominican friars in a kind of charmed middle ground between sacred and secular. He served terms both as prior of the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, the Etruscan hill town that overlooks Florence from the northeast, and as “syndic,” or administrator, of San Domenico’s newly founded branch within the walls of Florence, San Marco—after having decorated its altars, corridors, manuscripts, professors’ chairs, and friars’ cells—and at one point he was asked, although he refused, to serve as archbishop of Florence. Furthermore, both his sober conduct and his painted homilies seem to have done an effective job of bringing people together rather than turning them against one another in times of daunting turbulence. A century after his death, Giorgio Vasari described him as “di natura posato e buono”: a good-natured man with his feet set firmly on the ground.

In a city with an exploding population, a boisterous government, and increasing disparities of wealth, he sought to calm the fears of rich and poor alike by showing them, through his painted images, that the way to Heaven, though arduous, was open to all. Jesus may have observed that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25), but the Three Magi, the wise men from the East who came to Bethlehem with their exotic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, afforded living proof that the feat was not impossible. Florentine bankers like Angelico’s patrons Palla Strozzi and Cosimo de’ Medici eagerly adopted the Three Magi as their models and cultivated intellectual interests as well as financial empires.

The Strozzi were natives of Fiesole and had already established a stronghold in Florence by the twelfth century, branching out into commerce and politics with glittering success. Predictably they looked down their long, urbane noses at the emergence in the early fifteenth century of the Medici, a clan from the mountainous region of the Mugello, over the hills and far to the north of Fiesole. The future Fra Angelico was also born in the Mugello, perhaps around 1395, and fulfilled his first painting contracts, at around the age of twenty, as Guido di Piero, but he entered religious life as a Dominican friar in Fiesole and signed his later contracts as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. Both the Strozzi and the Medici could regard him, therefore, as a neighbor.

Florence at the turn of the fifteenth century was still a republican commune governed by a system of powerful guilds, which had enabled the city to recover more quickly from the Black Death of 1348 than many of its neighbors. Traditionally the dominant members of this merchant oligarchy, a handful of families and a handful of guilds, observed a rough sense of equality and shied away from overt displays of personal wealth, but those habits were beginning to change, as commerce spread across the globe and the fortunes to be made increased exponentially.

When Palla Strozzi emerged as the richest man in Florence in the early 1400s, he swathed himself and his family in silks and turbans worthy of a sultan. The exhibition displays a tiny panel painted by Strozzi’s favorite artist, Gentile da Fabriano. It is dated 1423, the same year in which Guido di Piero signed his first known contract as a friar. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple focuses attention on a young matron extravagantly outfitted in modern dress, with a fur-lined gown and an enormous gilded turban, undoubtedly Strozzi’s wife, Marietta. On the opposite side of the Temple courtyard, we see the poorest of the Florentine poor: two ragged beggars, a starving disabled man and a stooped old woman. This little panel of tempera on wood once formed part of Gentile’s magnificent Adoration of the Magi, in which a turbaned Strozzi, clad in maroon brocade, stands just behind one of the Magi, his pet falcon perched on his yellow-gloved wrist. He is only a touch less elaborately dressed than the Three Magi. Like those wise men from the East, Strozzi was a learned man, and he invited Byzantine Greek scholars to Florence as part of a long-standing effort to reconcile Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians.

Nine years later, in 1432, Strozzi ordered another altarpiece for the family church of Santa Trinità. Gentile da Fabriano had died in 1427, so the scholarly magnate turned instead to Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, whose Strozzi altarpiece portrays him in a more muted vein. Here he stands at the foot of the Cross, his bare hands gingerly holding the instruments of Christ’s torment: the Crown of Thorns and the three nails newly extracted from the dead Messiah’s hands and feet. Rather than a turban, Strozzi wears a mazzocchio, the fashionable cap of Florentine high society, painted, like his soft boots, tights, and jacket, in brilliant shades of kermes red, a pigment ground from the bodies of thousands of tiny beetles and the most expensive textile dye on the market. His overgarment, or giornea, a sleeveless mantle bordered in cloth of gold embroidery, is a radiant violet hue composed of a mixture of kermes red, Venetian lead white, and ultramarine, sumptuous, but decidedly more subdued than Gentile da Fabriano’s Eastern finery. Another figure in modern dress, a man with a black mazzocchio, has earned a place among the group that has climbed up the Cross to carry the body of Jesus: Strehlke identifies him as Palla Strozzi’s grandfather, another Palla, Palla di Jacopo.

Angelico lavishes his gift for detail on a magnificent perspective view of Jerusalem as a snow-white (actually lead-white) walled city set on a hill, but he focuses his chief attention on the finely modeled, dramatically diagonal, limp body of Jesus. The dead man’s skin, as pale as parchment, is crisscrossed with the bruises from his flagellation, but these wounds are so fine as to be barely perceptible; what we see instead is an extraordinarily beautiful human figure. Near the base of the Cross, drops of vermilion blood stream downward and form rivulets on the ground. For Fra Giovanni, the blood of Christ, spilled at the Crucifixion, contained the essence of that eternal life his sacrifice offered to flawed humanity. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans’ great theologian, declared that just one drop of it could save the world. Fittingly, whenever possible, Angelico used the finest vermilion or kermes red to paint this divine substance. Its conspicuous presence in his paintings can almost be taken as a signature. According to Vasari, he never painted a crucifix without weeping.

The painter’s Dominican congregation in Fiesole belonged to the breakaway Observant branch of the order, committed to obeying their founder’s original rule, which had demanded poverty so strict that the friars could own nothing and lived only on the alms they managed to beg from day to day. Over the course of two centuries, since the Spanish priest Domingo de Guzmán had won papal approval for his order in 1216, the Dominicans, perhaps 10,000 strong by 1400, had established hundreds of convents in a dozen countries, staffed illustrious universities, carried out inquisitions and foreign missions, and, inevitably, come to manage huge sums of money. The chief Dominican congregation in Florence, Santa Maria Novella, belonged to the dominant Conventuals, who accepted these developments as a natural response to changing times. (Parallel tensions between Conventuals and Observants divided the other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and the Augustinians.) Despite his strongly held position as an Observant, Angelico took the missionary aspect of his vocation seriously, creating images that carefully emphasized the common religious ground uniting Christianity as a whole. He accepted commissions from Franciscans as well as Dominicans, Conventuals as well as Observants, men and women, lay and religious. His order drew its inspiration from Saint Paul’s proclamation, “We preach Christ crucified,” and that is what Angelico did through his art.

In 1436 a group of friars from the Observant Dominican congregation of Fiesole moved down the hill to take over the Florentine church of San Marco. Under the sponsorship of Palla Strozzi’s bitter rival Cosimo de’ Medici, the convent was rebuilt by the same architect, Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, who was building the sprawling Palazzo Medici a few blocks away. It is elegant but austere, with small windows blocked off by wooden shutters that reduced the daylight entering the friars’ cells to a dismal minimum; each aperture is about the size of a human hand. The only exception to the gloom was the magnificent library, its manuscripts tethered by chains to thirty-six reading desks. Not long afterward Fra Giovanni moved down from Fiesole to live in this dark abode among the friars of San Marco. With the help of his assistants, he also decorated the convent’s cells, corridors, and public spaces, developing his clear, essential theology in a series of frescoes carried out, in stark contrast to the rest of his work, with the cheapest of ingredients. (See illustration at right.) Because the sky was said to have darkened at the moment of Christ’s death, he could use charcoal rather than ultramarine to paint it in scenes of the Crucifixion. He rendered the blood of Christ in red ochre, an earth, rather than costly vermilion or kermes, but it flowed far more freely in the paintings he designed for the friars’ cells than it did in his more public paintings, just as the friars’ blood flowed when they flagellated themselves in imitation of Christ.

For the Annunciation at the top of the stairs leading to the dormitory, he crushed mica into the pigments he employed for the angel Gabriel’s wings. Only one wayward flake has straggled out of bounds. By the time he painted a Madonna and Child in one of the corridors, his style had changed dramatically from that of his earliest years. From slender, swaying late Gothic figures, he had shifted to the solid proportions favored by contemporaries like the painter Masaccio, the sculptor Donatello, and the ancient art and architecture from which these artists drew their inspiration. His Madonnas changed too, from a Byzantine standard, with prominent noses and receding chins, to strong-jawed faces inspired by ancient statues.

The altarpiece he painted around 1440 for the convent church of San Marco marks that watershed clearly. Subsidized by Cosimo de’ Medici, it was even more splendid when it was made than it is now; its travels since the early nineteenth century (which recently ended back where they started, in San Marco) have worn down its surface, especially the Madonna’s face. Angelico’s earlier altarpieces, like the Deposition painted for Palla Strozzi, fit into a traditional wooden triptych frame, rising up in spires of Gothic tracery. Cosimo, almost twenty years younger than Strozzi and his successor as the richest man in Florence, favored the new classical style, and so did the painter.

In the San Marco altarpiece, fictive golden curtains part to reveal, theatrically, a perspective tableau centered on the Madonna, who sits on a golden throne with conspicuously classical Corinthian pilasters and marble steps. (See illustration on page 12.) Behind her a dense thicket of trees, loaded with ripe fruit, cannot entirely block the glorious landscape that extends into the distance. A Persian carpet, spread at her feet in a masterpiece of foreshortening, seems all the more teasingly real because the artist has inserted a tiny, gold-backed panel portraying the Crucifixion in “front” of it, a painting within a painting. When this sturdy square panel stood on the high altar of the church of San Marco, the miniature Crucifixion, with its spurting blood of Christ, would have matched the eye level of the priests who said Mass.

In the main image, three saints stand to the right of the Madonna’s throne, their names inscribed within their halos so that there can be no confusion about their identity. Saint Dominic, in the order’s habit, a black mantle over white cassock, a white lily in his hand to signify his purity, flanks Saint Francis in a brown Franciscan robe, his feet bare and his hands joined in prayer. Characteristically, the wound on the saint’s left hand, duplicating the wounds that Christ suffered on the Cross, is signaled by a discreet reddish dot, far less conspicuous than the meticulously rendered veins on the hands of the third saint, another Dominican; his wounded skull identifies him as Peter Martyr, one of the order’s first inquisitors, who was ambushed and killed on the road to Milan before he could set up shop.

To the left of the Madonna’s throne, beneath Saints Mark, John the Evangelist, and Lawrence, the kneeling figure of the vermilion-hatted physician Saint Cosmas is clearly a portrait of San Marco’s benefactor Cosimo de’ Medici, who had his own cell within the convent of San Marco on a corridor with other laymen, close to the library. The great patriarch of the Medici clan looks out from the picture with pleading eyes, lending an unexpected poignancy to his flushed, homely face. His fur-lined red giornea and his ultramarine blue physician’s gown with its fur-lined sleeves allude, like Palla Strozzi’s ensemble in Angelico’s Deposition from the Cross, to his own worldly stature as well as to the profession of his patron saint. The physician twins Cosmas and Damian were slain by the emperor Diocletian around the year 300, and Cosimo de’ Medici had a twin, Damiano, who died in infancy; that is why Angelico shows Saint Damian with his face turned toward the Madonna and away from us, beyond mortal reach.

In 1445, Fra Giovanni received a summons from Rome to decorate the Vatican Palace for Pope Eugenius IV, who had spent much of his pontificate in Florence and knew the artist’s work firsthand. Not long afterward, the archbishop of Florence died, and Eugenius offered that position to the friar as well. This honor he refused, and instead recommended another Observant Dominican from the congregation of Fiesole, Antonino Pierozzi, whose service as archbishop in those turbulent years earned him canonization in 1523. Angelico, obliging in so many ways, was perfectly capable of saying no. Shortly after appointing Archbisop Antonino, the pope died, but his successor, Nicholas V, retained Angelico’s Vatican commissions, presenting him with a bag of the finest lapis lazuli, its superb quality still gleaming forth on the walls of the recently restored Niccoline Chapel in the Vatican Museums.

Among the ruins of Rome, Angelico’s classical style took on a more monumental quality, and his painted architecture in particular acquired a new sophistication. According to Vasari, the Chapel of the Sacrament was a masterpiece, “outstanding in that style of his,” but we will never know: Pope Paul III destroyed it in 1538, probably in the belief that all that gold and those pure primary colors were hopelessly old-fashioned. Nor can we see the paintings Angelico executed for the Dominican prelate Juan de Torquemada in Rome’s Dominican stronghold, the church and convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva; the altarpieces have disappeared and the frescoes perished in a seventeenth-century renovation. (The mild, respected Juan was the uncle of the notorious Tomás de Torquemada, the first head of the Spanish Inquisition.)

Fra Angelico’s other monumental assignment in these years is only half finished: in the summer of 1447 the painter took up residence in Orvieto to decorate a huge side chapel in the city’s cathedral. The theme of the Last Judgment seems to have been developed in consultation with the artist, but he and his team left after only fifteen weeks of work, never to return. Once again Friar Giovanni said no, perhaps out of sheer claustrophobia. The little hilltop town of seven thousand people, isolated on its volcanic crag, was racked by a protracted family feud that was still raging when Luca Signorelli completed the commission fifty years later. Some battles exceeded even the angelic friar’s capacity to soothe turbulent souls. Luckily, as the visitors to his exhibition in Florence will agree, his surviving legacy is radiant enough to brighten our own troubled times.