The Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is presenting an extraordinary exhibition celebrating Fra Angelico, one of the most revered masters of early Italian Renaissance painting. This comprehensive showcase, featuring over 140 works displayed across both the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, represents what may be the most significant Fra Angelico exhibition in decades and stands as an absolute highlight of this autumn's art season.

While faith may seem distant in today's world, and art is sometimes called the new religion, there exists religious art that continues to move us profoundly. Such is the art created by the Florentine painter Beato Angelico. Born Guido di Pietro, his contemporaries called him "Beato" - the Blessed One - because his paintings are imbued with deeply felt spirituality. His Madonnas possess an angelic tenderness unprecedented in the era of early Italian Renaissance around the mid-15th century.

The exhibition features invaluable loans from major institutions including the Louvre in Paris, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Vatican in Rome. Among the remarkable works on display are paintings with faces that appear powdered with pastel chalk, framed by golden hair and touched with luminous rose on the cheeks. The Virgin Mary and the Christ child communicate through restrained, intimate gazes that reveal the artist's nickname: Beato Angelico - the inspired, angelic one.

Fra Angelico (1395-1455) likely received training as a manuscript illuminator and was initially known as a fresco painter before receiving important commissions for altarpieces. Above all, Angelico was a monk who relatively early joined a religious brotherhood. As Fra Angelico - Brother Angelico - he was both a religiously inspired artist and an artistically gifted man of God. His daily life in the San Marco monastery in Florence consisted of three activities: praying, painting, and reading.

His works impressed contemporaries through their deeply felt religious intimacy, and this art still communicates spontaneously to modern viewers because Angelico managed to breathe new life into the rigid stylizations of Gothic art. The Christ child in his Cedri Madonna displays physical robustness - a true bundle of joy who appears to have real weight. Correspondingly, the delicate Mary grips him firmly and securely with one arm while holding his little foot with her other hand for balance. These movements appear natural and lifelike.

Angelico's paintings are full of animated vitality. He was probably the first artist to paint a storm - a predella panel from the famous Linaioli Tabernacle in San Marco shows a hailstorm breaking over the tormentors who are dragging Saint Mark to death with a rope. Angelico's painting breaks open the pathos of Gothic art. While he still uses the characteristic gold ground, he no longer presents it as a flat background but as a moving, vegetal-ornamental drapery, as seen in the enchanting Virgin of Humility from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

A major achievement of the exhibition is the reconstruction of the San Marco Altar at Palazzo Strozzi. For the first time in three hundred years, thanks to loans from the Louvre, the Bavarian State Painting Collections, the National Gallery in Washington, and other important institutions, 17 of the 18 paintings have been reunited. This allows visitors to experience the complete impact in its original splendor, with Mary and the Christ child surrounded by angels and saints in a composition dating from 1438-1442.

Much in Angelico's work already points to the innovations of Renaissance painting. Perspectively bold elements can be discovered in his paintings. An altar fragment from a private collection in Long Island, New York, shows Saints Catherine of Alexandria and John the Baptist. The torture instrument and symbol of the martyr - a wheel armed with metal spikes - is rendered by Angelico in strongly foreshortened side view as a narrow oval. Catherine's silky red cloak flows gently over it like a caress, while her countenance shimmers otherworldly from the luminous gold ground.

The visible body parts of many figures in Angelico's altar paintings - whether Madonna with Child, angels, or saints - seem to come from another sphere. The golden, luminous sun disks of the halos appear from yet another kind of physical reality. The garments, meanwhile, display almost haptic realism. One can feel the softness of the velvety blue Marian cloak, the shining elevation of the borders embroidered with gold threads, the weight of the brocades, and the metallic firmness of brooches and fibulae.

However, it is not merely this alchemy of stupendous painting skill that astonishes in today's age of digital illusionism. This painting has nothing to do with effect-seeking. While Angelico routinely adopted what the canon of Gothic church painting offered as a template, the emotional depth he managed to infuse into his works is the true mystery of this art. The answer to how Fra Angelico makes the divine shine forth in his works is multifaceted: there is the contrast between the luminous tenderness of the figures' flesh and the substantial materialism of all things textile - an opposition between heavenly transcendence and worldly splendor.

Fra Angelico's painted religiosity reaches its peak where he seemed closest to God. The monastery, for whose decoration the Medici family as art patrons gave Angelico free rein, became a kind of total work of art by the painter-monk. Here he recited from the illuminated books of hours he had created, here he walked among his own frescoes, and here he prayed in each of the 43 monk cells he had personally decorated with biblical motifs.

These paintings belong to the quintessence of Christian-mystical painting. They reveal, beyond the magnificent, gold-decorated altarpieces, Angelico's deep faith. Climbing the stairs under the monastery roof to the monk cells, visitors are greeted by the large fresco of the Annunciation in reduced pastel tones. As if this image should also announce to the faithful in the cloister: Pray, and you will receive the divine message yourself.

This fresco and all others manage without gold and the extremely expensive pigment lapis lazuli. Another representation of the Annunciation of Mary in cell 3 appears to consist of merely three color tones, so reduced and modest was Angelico's approach here. Another example of this concentrated, sparse monastery painting is the fresco in cell 7, showing the mocked Christ with the crown of thorns. Before him sit Mary and Saint Dominic, but they turn their backs to the scene - he reading, she in devout introspection. They do not see the Man of Sorrows; rather, they visualize his suffering in quiet meditation.

The Fra Angelico exhibition runs at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco in Florence through January 25, 2026, offering visitors an unprecedented opportunity to experience the work of this master who made faith visible through his transcendent art.