Angelico's Angels

Annamaria on Monday

 

As usual, I am writing this blog on Sunday, and it is the closing day of one of the most popular exhibitions staged in Florence in the past several years.  Who would've thunk, as a died-in-the wool New Yorker might say.  Yes, certainly, I would have expected fans of Medieval and Renaissance art would have been expected to show up in goodly numbers, but the turn out was huge compared to what the organizers most likely anticipated. I first learned about it from a glowing review last fall in the New York Times.

Beato Angelico was one of the first artists I learned about in my college art history class.  (He was Fra Angelico in those days before his beatification by Pope John Paul II in 1982.)  He never became a household word.  His fame was overwhelmed by the widespread admiration for his fellow early 15th century artists, like Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc. etc. If you click on his name above to learn more about him, you will quickly learn that he was a Dominican friar. Unlike his fellow Renaissance painters, all of his works are of religious subjects.

Today is the last day of the exhibition, and I'm so grateful that I have had the opportunity to view the works on display, here both in the Monastery of San Marco and in the galleries of Palazzo Strozzi.

Rather than a wholesale vision of the exhibition, I am giving you a particular viewpoint of the paintings. Some of the followers of this blog may recall that I am enamored of idea of angels. I am fond of quoting Kurt Vonnegut: "If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."  Considering the state of the world these days, we need all the angels we can summon. So here they are for you today. Angels as Beato Angelico pictured them (with a few other images thrown in for good luck).

In the Monastery of San Marco 

 

 

Palazzo Strozzi 

(If my images seem a little out of whack, please forgive me. The exhibition was crowded, mostly by folks 6 to 14 inches taller than I :( )