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Fra Angelico's Deposition from the Cross: The Circumstances Explored
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The Strozzis were a large, rich and powerful family in the Florence of the 1420s. Like many aristocratic merchant families of the time, they planned a chapel where only they would have the right to be buried. Such privatised funerary and memorial arrangements were not unusual, though in combining theirs with a functioning sacristy in the monastic church of Santa Trinita, the Strozzis started a trend which was to be important in the evolution of Renaissance architecture. Because it was stripped of furnishings and pictures in the seventeenth century, the chapel-sacristy at Santa Trinita now looks bare, but in the early fifteenth century it was full of colour and religious imagery.
The head of the family, Palla Strozzi, took a leading part in the planning of the memorial chapel. He negotiated with the monks, engaged an architect, masons and stone carvers and had his deceased father entombed in a wall of the as yet uncompleted building. In a real sense it was Palla’s project His choice of artists to paint pictures for it reveals his taste. He commissioned Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist in Italy, to paint the Adoration of the Magi, and Lorenzo Monaco, the leading practitioner in Florence of the International Gothic style, to produce a Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Gentile’s work is now in the Uffizi, but Lorenzo died in 1425 leaving the Deposition unfinished. Twenty years later Fra Angelico completed it, and today it hangs in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.
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- Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Baldini, Umberto: in Elsa Morante's L'Opera completa dell' Angelico, 1970. The last section is a useful Catalogo delle Opere by Baldini. Item 58, Pala di Santa Trinita, gives a brisk survey of critical opinion.
2 Pope‐Hennessy, John: Fra Angelico, 1974, pp, 210–211 for a more discursive account of the picture's date and authenticity.
3 Orlandi, Stefano O.P.: Beato Angelico, 1964 p.48, citing the “Giomale e levate di messer Palla di Noferi Strozzi” (Carte Strozziane, S.IV, n.345) mentions gifts of wine [102 barrels!] as an indication that in 1431 and 1432 Palla was already asking Fra Angelico to finish Lorenzo Monaco's painting, but this seems to strain the evidence: making gifts in kind instead of cash hardly suggests more than a desire on Palla's part to continue his generosity to the Fiesole Dominicans in a time of financial stringency.
4 Belle, Lawrence William: A Renaissance Patrician, Palla di Nofri Strozzi, 1372–1462. Unpublished doctoral thesis, 1971Google Scholar. There is no biography of Palla Strozzi in English and I have been fortunate to have had access to Mr. Belle's dissertation on microfilm by countesy of the British Library. The page references cited here are to a copy printed on paper by UMI in 1993 (72–28, 725). See pp.3–8 for a biographical summary.
5 Belle, op. cit., p.83; Gutkind, Curt: Cosimo de'medici, Pater Patriae, 1389–1464, pp. 21–22, for useful accounts of the Catasto.
6 Belle, op.cit., pp. 291–306 for an account of the political crisis and dramatic events of 1433/34.
7 Ross, Janet: Lives of the Early Medici as Told in Their Correspondence, 1910, pp. 19–22, 22–25, for quotations from Cosimo's Ricordi. Curt Gutkind's book, cited in Note 5, above, is the last full‐length biography in English. It was published in 1938 with useful appendices but, as Lawrence Belle politely notes, ‘without access to archival sources’. Christopher Hibbert's Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (1974) offers a concise account of Cosimo in Chapter 4, while the essays in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de'Medici, 1389‐1464, published in 1992, illuminate many aspects of a man whose delight was to keep people in the dark. We look forward to the forthcoming publication of Susan McKillop's book.
8 Gutkind, op.cit., pp.82–5, seems to be the first to avail of the information given in Traversari's Hodoeporicon, printed in 1581 and more recently in Dino Traversari's Ambrogio Traversari e suoi tempi, 1912.
9 Macchiavelli, Niccolo: Istorie Florentine. IV, 7. cited by Belle, p. 21; I have quoted from Morley's English translation, 1891, p. 222.
10 Wegener, W.J.: ‘That the practice of arms is most excellent declare the statues of valiant men’ in Renaissance Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, June 1993, p. 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and see her footnote 75 for Cambi's suggestion that the three sets of images were still on the Bargello wall in the 1490s.
11 Cammerer‐George, Monika: Die Rahmung der Toscanischen Altarbilder im Trecento. 1966, pp.187, 188. I am indebted to Mr. George Mayer for translating the relevant pages.
12 Belle, op.cit., p. 317.
13 Orlandi, op cit., p. 52
14 Lapaccini, Giuliano O.P.: La Cronaca del Convento di San Marco. Biblioteca Laurenziana No.370; printed (first part only) in Archivio Storico Italiano, LXXI, Vol.1, disp. 1 del 1913, edited Raoul Morcay, p.23 for Cosimo's expenditure.
15 Vasari, Georgio: The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 2nd ed., 1568; Penguin edition, 1965, translated George Bull, Vol. 2, p. 200: “Cosimo de'Medici was among those who loved and admired Fra Angelico …”