| In the Review’s February 26 issue, Ingrid D. Rowland visits a “grand,” “triumphant,” “dazzling” exhibition of Fra Angelico’s paintings, frescoes, and early illuminated manuscripts spread across the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco in Florence: Fra Angelico and his workshop lavished…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.… 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.
Below, alongside Rowland’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Renaissance Florentine artists. The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality. “Since the end of classical antiquity nearly a thousand years before, no Italian sculptor had tried anything so bold in the carving of marble sculpture.” —April 23, 2015 “What do we see in Piero della Francesca’s work? An extraordinarily fine mind contemplating an ordinary settledness. What it recognizes are structured bodies inhabiting a more or less unstructured earth. That Piero conceives his women and men, his buildings and tree trunks, alike, as clear concrete volumes, has often been noted: the freeform of his foliage, hills, and skies less so, yet it supplies half the pleasure of his painting.” —June 19, 2014 “The boldness of Ghiberti’s new approach [in the doors to the Baptistery of San Giovanni] can be seen in the combination of vast spatial vistas, continuous and unifying, with discontinuities in time in the same panel.… The space on the doors themselves is real—they are three-dimensional, in many variations of full figures, semi-rounded ones, and relief so subtle as to be a series of undulations and dimplings in the imagined distance.” —November 8, 2007 Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. “The justly famous ten reliefs of the Cantoria display a distinctive style heavily dependent on Graeco-Roman sources that has no direct antecedents on Florentine soil. How did Luca della Robbia develop it? Under which master, or masters, did he work before he became a master in his own right?” —April 1, 1980 “Again and again Antonio Pollajuolo startles us with his extraordinary descriptive powers. The wrinkled glove on the right hand of Galeazzo Maria Sforza in the Uffizi, the crystal stem of the mirror in the right hand of the Mercanzia Prudence, the discarded hat of St. James in the San Miniato altarpiece, the heavy, steel-tipped arrows in the quivers of the soldiers in the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian represent a method of looking different from that of any other fifteenth-century Florentine artist. Pollajuolo was fascinated by texture: of water—did he, one wonders, touch up the somnolent stream which Piero inserted in the back of the San Miniato altarpiece; of fabric—witness the raised gesso lilies prepared for gilding in the Sforza portrait; of hair, as in the raised strands in the marvelous profile portrait of a lady in Milan.” —March 8, 1979 You are receiving this message because you signed up
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