Author Description

To visit the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence is a uniquely moving and satisfying experience. Here, around 1440, in the tiny whitewashed cells of the friars, in the corridors, cloister and chapter house, Fra Angelico and his assistants - who included the young Benozzo Gozzoli - painted a series of images centred upon the theme of Christ's sacrifice. Conceived and executed as aids to meditation and prayer, they have taken their place among the most exhilarating masterpieces of Western art. Their deep spirituality springs from the Christian theology that was the basis of Fra Angelico's life, but in their humanity and in elements of their style, Fra Angelico comes close to the circle of Masaccio and Ghiberti, at the dawn of the Renaissance. 'The sources of his feeling', wrote the great art historian Bernard Berenson, 'are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern.'. This magnificent book is an unprecedented record of the frescoes as they appear today, after a long and successful campaign of restoration that is described by Giorgio Bonsanti. An introduction to the building, and to the painter, is followed by a fully illustrated survey of every picture, with details shown in actual size. Enabling us to come closer than ever before to his work, Fra Angelico: The San Marco Frescoes reveals the artist's tenderness and strength, his freshness of colour and his extraordinary luminosity and subtlety of modelling, and is a superb visual record of this great artistic and spiritual ensemble.