Fra Angelico

Igino Benvenuto Supino wrote this study while serving as inspector at the Bargello in Florence, and he follows the Dominican painter Fra Giovanni Angelico (c. 1400-1455) through four stages: the years at Cortona and Perugia from 1409, the long spell at Fiesole, the Florentine work centered on the convent of San Marco, and the last commissions in Rome and Orvieto. He opens by asking whether the pious legends around the friar hold up, then keeps measuring Vasari’s anecdotes against convent chronicles and the pictures themselves, separating firm attributions from shaky ones without flattening the devotional feeling. Close to eighty plates accompany the text, reproducing work at San Marco, the Uffizi, Cortona, the Vatican, Orvieto Cathedral, the Louvre, Berlin, and the National Gallery in London. Leader Scott translated it for the Florentine photographic house of Alinari in 1902.