Fra Angelico's earliest known altarpiece returns to Fiesole after restoration

Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455), the Dominican friar who became one of the leading painters of the Florentine Quattrocento, took his vows at the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, in the hills above Florence. It was there that the young religious produced his first substantial paintings, before the fresco cycles that secured his reputation. The panel regarded as his earliest surviving altarpiece has now returned to the site, following a conservation campaign.

According to The Art Newspaper, the work underwent careful repair and cleaning before being reinstalled at Fiesole. The intervention produced a discovery: a throne, previously concealed, emerged beneath the visible surface, evidence of the composition's original state before later reworking.

The altarpiece is not the product of a single moment. It was modified several decades after its execution by Lorenzo di Credi (c. 1457-1536), a Florentine painter trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, where Leonardo da Vinci also worked. Such updates were common in church altarpieces around the turn of the 16th century, adapting older images to the visual expectations of a new generation of patrons — often at the cost of erasing substantial parts of the original invention.

The reappearance of the throne therefore sheds light both on the picture's material history and on the manner of the young Fra Angelico, still close to the gold grounds and enthroned formats inherited from Gothic tradition, yet already moving towards the spatial clarity that would define his mature work.

By returning the altarpiece to the place for which it was conceived, the project gives visitors the uncommon chance to see an early Quattrocento painting in the setting that produced it.

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Written by the ADM desk based on The Art Newspaper. Read the original article for the full story.