American director brings Beato Angelico fresco to life with tableau vivant

The power, beauty, and spiritual intensity of Fra Angelico ’s work inspired American director Armondo Linus Acosta for Fra Angelico’s Communion: The Living Tableau, the second film work in a series of four tableau vivant, visual rewrites of extraordinary masterpieces. The protagonist of Fra Angelico ’s Communion is Blessed Angelico’s fresco of The Communion of the Apostles, otherwise referred to as theInstitution of the Eucharist, which is located in cell number 35, overlooking the cloister of Sant’Antonino, in the northern corridor of the former friars’ dormitory on the second floor.

Acosta recreated and filmed the scene together with The Academy of Film and the Arts art collective, transforming it into a living, vibrant experience to the notes of Quando corpus morietur from Rossini’s Stabat Mater.

Fra Angelico’s Communion is the ideal sequel to The LastSupper : The Living Tableau made in 2019, a filmic reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci ’sLast Supper that brought together three Oscar-winning masters of world cinematography, such as Vittorio Storaro, Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo.

The ten-minute film will be premiered at the Museo di San Marco, in Michelozzo’s Monumental Library, on Saturday, February 18, 2023, at 5 p.m. on the feast of Beato Angelico, patron saint of artists, by Armondo Linus Acosta together with Stefano Casciu, regional director Museums of Tuscany, and Angelo Tartuferi, director of the Museo di San Marco, in the presence of some of the actors and the production team. The screening will be preceded by a six-minute backstage film showing the various stages in the development of the work. Admission is free while seats last.

“I thank all the people involved in this project,” said Stefano Casciu, “internal and external to the Museum of San Marco, which reconfirms itself at the center of an intense cultural activity that, starting from the history of the Dominican convent so important for the city of Florence, opens more and more to different artistic expressions and to contemporaneity.”

“The filmic recreation of the Angelic fresco, characterized by beautiful cinematography, literally nails the viewer on the edge of a very high spiritual tension,” Angelo Tartuferi pointed out, “which can be felt by anyone, believer or not, until the culminating moment of Jesus’ final gaze turned to the Mother, an unusual presence on the iconographic level that nevertheless assumes a decisive role.”

Acosta also developed the stage action to emphasize that Mary is an etheric figure and that the maternal principle is the source of all grace. “Jesus does not look at her as a human being, as his mother,” Acosta explains. “He just casts a glance as if he is looking at someone walking behind him, and turning around he is almost surprised ’Oh, it’s you’.... I really believe that she is not real in the painting... She is the mystical force behind everything, even this mother planet. This planet is based on the mother, on the seed, on life, and she is the Mother... I love to show something that is alive in a mystical, devotional sense, like the host in Jesus’ hand, an image of extraordinary power.”

The choice of Beato Angelico’s fresco unequivocally attests, should there still be a need, to the inexhaustible power of the spiritual message of the friar painter, capable of provoking at a distance of centuries absolutely original readings and interpretations, even very different in their results. Acosta’s filmic transposition itself, strictly adherent in its spatial layout and distribution of characters, deviates not a little from the serene atmosphere from every point of view, including the chromatic one, conveyed by the painting in cell 35 of the Florentine museum, to arrive at an emotional implantation that one would almost say “Caravaggesque.”

After the first screening, all visitors to the museum will be able to watch the film, exclusively until Easter Sunday, April 9, on loop on a screen in the Small Refectory, in front of Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper fresco.

The Feast of Blessed Angelico will open on Saturday, Feb. 18, with two thematic tours of the museum scheduled at 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. by the staff (included in the entrance fee) and will conclude at 6:30 p.m. with Mass in the Basilica of San Marco officiated by Father Bernardo Gianni OSB, abbot of San Miniato al Monte.

Image: Armondo Linus Acosta, Fra Angelico’s Communion: The Living Tableau (still from film). Courtesy of The Academy of Film and the Arts.

American director brings Beato Angelico fresco to life with tableau vivant

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