Continued the Beato Angelico (Fra Angelico) exhibition at Museo di San Marco.

In the cloister is a Fra Angelico fresco. The subject, Crucifixion with Saint Dominic, is repeated with variations on a smaller scale inside many of the friars’ cells.

The current complex was built through a donation by Cosimo Medici and there are Medici symbols throught (although not in this photo).

The exhibition shows the evolution of Fra Angelico’s style and the interaction with his contemporaries. One of his earliest known altarpieces from Fiesole Cathedral shows development of perspective—not perfect but clearly something he was interested in.

The work has been significantly altered from its original. An attempt at reconstructing what it might have been like:

One of his possible teachers may have been Gherardo Starnina. Very few of his paintings remain. His style is International Gothic, characterized by elegant and decorative shapes and lines.

Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, called Masaccio, is regarded as the great early Renaissance painter who demonstrated a clear understanding of perspective. But the exhibition shows that what he was doing, Fra Angelico was also attempting.

Fra Angelico did not always do small works

We went into the convento, which in English, convent, is thought of as a place where nuns lived but in Italy, it is also the name for where friars and monks lived. Fra Angelico and his assistants decorated every cell, the little room where a friar slept, studied and prayed.

The stairway going up to the cells has a famous fresco of the Annunciation. So famous everyone stops on the stairs to take a photo.

When I finally got to the top to look at the fresco, I forgot to take a photo. This was taken by one of the other participants.

Each cell has a different fresco which is intended to help the inhabitant pray and remember the purpose of being a Dominican. Some are definitely about more pleasant subjects than others.

The most famous resident of San Marco was Girolamo Savonarola. He became head of the convento and wanted the church to be more Christian and for him, this meant eliminating corruption, secularism and mistreatment of the poor. He was an ascetic and advocated the destruction of secular luxuries like non-Christian painting, fancy clothes, jewellery and non-Christian or pagan books. His reform activities included “bonfires of the vanities”, where unapproved of items were thrown into a fire, sometimes taken unwillingly from the owners by Savonarola’s supporters.

His preaching was so popular, from 1494-1498, he became the de facto ruler of Florence and helped expel the Medici.

But Savonarola made the mistake of fighting the Pope, Alexander VI (Borgia) and ended up being burned at the stake.

We took a quick look at the library where friars and monks produced illuminated manuscripts.

After a quick lunch, we went to the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine to look at the frescoes produced by Masaccio, and Tommaso di Cristoforo Fini, known as Masolino. An over simplified gloss on art history describes the Brancacci Chapel as the place where Renaissance art was born. The work was begun about 1423.

Naturalism in the bodies, identifiable landscape, perspective, use of single light source to create shadow are elements of the frescoes that are considered Renaissance but the Fra Angelico exhibition shows that these were also elements being worked on in Fra Angelico’s work. No one painter or work can take credit for creating Renaissance art.

The bottom section was done around 1485 by Fillipino Lippi after Masaccio had died and after the sponsor returned from exile.