Fra Angelico

In commemoration of the five hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of Fra Angelico (about 1395-1455), one of the foremost artists of the Italian Renaissance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art set out to reexamine his career and to establish a more historically accurate profile of the innovative, extraordinarily gifted "angelic friar,' in order to dispel the myths and legends that have eclipsed the details of his life. New documentary research and standards for attributions, developed over the last three decades, provided the impetus for this reappraisal - only the second major exhibition of Fra Angelico's art ever held, and the first since 1955. Comprising about seventy-five paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations ascribed to Angelico and spanning the period from 1410 to 1455, as well as about forty works by his collaborators, this presentation includes several newly discovered paintings and a number of new proposals for reconstructions of important, dispersed altarpieces. Additionally, drawings by the master are analyzed in terms of their original function and in the context of discussion of the artist's workshop, its identifiable members, and their respective contribution to its artistic output.
In essays and related entries, the first seven sections of the catalogue follow the course of Angelico's career. The study opens with his earliest, largely undocumented, activity as a painter (in the 1410s), before he joined the Dominican order, emphasizing those works that reflect his artistic, intellectual, and spiritual milieu. In dealing with the paintings of the 1420s, many of which will be unfamiliar to the general public and are the subject of widespread disagreement among scholars regarding dating and attribution, the authors attempt to establish their chronology within the master's oeuvre.

Laurence Kanter is Curator-in-Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of Early European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. Pia Palladino is Associate Curator of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Magnolia Scudieri is Director of the Museo di San Marco in Florence. Carl Strehlke is Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Victor Schmidt is Professor of Fine Arts at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Anneke de Vries is an independent art historian.