Crucifixion with Saint Dominic
Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455) · Second quarter of the fifteenth century
On a tall wall with an arched top and a painted frame, Christ hangs on the cross against a deep blue ground. At the left stands the Virgin, wrapped in a dark mantle, her hands clasped; at the right Saint John, in red and green, looks up at the cross. At its foot, Saint Dominic kneels in his white habit and black cloak, embracing the wood and raising his face to Christ. The fresco is more than four metres high, so the cross towers over you as it once did over the friars for whom it was painted. There is no crowd, no landscape, only the crucified body, three witnesses and the bare ground, and the colours are restrained: pale flesh, the red of blood at the wounds, the grey and dark blue of the robes.
The scene was painted for the refectory of the convent of San Domenico at Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, where Fra Angelico himself was a friar. Placing the founder of the Dominican order at the foot of the cross was a device Angelico used again and again, most famously in the cells of San Marco in Florence, to invite each friar to put himself in Dominic's place while he ate or prayed. The composition is spare so as not to distract. Look at the lengthened body of Christ, the gold halos and the way the Virgin's grief is held in her clasped hands rather than her face.
Giorgio Vasari mentioned the fresco in place in 1568, and it stayed on the refectory wall until around 1875, when it was detached and passed to the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini. The Louvre bought it from him in 1880, adding a monumental Angelico to the Coronation of the Virgin it already owned. Detached frescoes travel badly and the surface has suffered, but the scale and the directness of the image make it one of the most moving works of early Renaissance Florence in Paris. It was painted between about 1425 and 1450, in the years of Angelico's maturity.
Did You Know? Vasari saw the fresco still on the refectory wall in 1568, more than a century after it was painted.
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