From September 26, 2025 to January 25, 2026, Florence pays tribute to Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole, universally known as Beato Angelico, with a major exhibition spread between two venues: Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco. The exhibition, titled simply Beato Angelico, is an ambitious project that is the result of a collaboration between the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, the Regional Directorate National Museums Tuscany of the Ministry of Culture and the Museum of San Marco.
It is the first major retrospective in Florence on the Dominican painter in more than seventy years, and represents a cultural and scientific operation of international significance, designed to rediscover, restore and enhance the figure of one of the fathers of Renaissance art.
Through a dialogue between the two exhibition venues, the exhibition explores the stylistic evolution, legacy and impact of the art of Beato Angelico (Vicchio, c. 1395 - Rome, 1455), comparing it with some of the most important artists of his contemporaries. On display are works and comparisons with Lorenzo Monaco, Masaccio, and Filippo Lippi, but also with great sculptors of the time such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Michelozzo, and Luca della Robbia. The exhibition allows us to understand Beato Angelico’s extraordinary ability to combine formal innovation, spiritual depth and intellectual rigor. His paintings, famous for their rendering of light, use of perspective and expressive delicacy, mark a fundamental turning point in the transition from late Gothic to full Renaissance art.
One of the most extraordinary elements of the initiative is the chance to see reunited, for the first time in more than two centuries, some of Beato Angelico’s most important altarpieces, now scattered among museums, churches and international collections. Thanks to a painstaking restoration campaign and a network of exceptional loans, the exhibition allows visitors to admire up close works from prestigious Italian and foreign institutions, but also from small territorial realities rich in historical and cultural value.
Paintings, miniatures, drawings and sculptures compose a body of works that restores the variety and depth of Angelico’s artistic production, in an immersive and exciting experience for scholars, enthusiasts and the general public.
The exhibition is the result of more than four years of work and is a project of the highest scholarly profile, curated by Carl Brandon Strehlke, Curator Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and internationally renowned expert on Italian Renaissance art. The section housed in the Museo di San Marco will be co-curated by Stefano Casciu, Regional Director of National Museums Tuscany - MiC, and Angelo Tartuferi, former Director of the Museum itself.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with critical and historical insights, which will help place Beato Angelico’s work in the broader context of Florentine and European art of the 15th century. The exhibition aims to be a unique opportunity to rediscover the figure of Beato Angelico as a revolutionary artist, capable of bringing a profoundly human spiritual dimension to painting. His works are not just images of devotion, but true visual meditations on the mystery of the sacred and light.
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| Florence, a major exhibition on Fra Angelico at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco |
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