Works by Fra Angelico

A Dominican friar who painted only religious subjects, Fra Angelico combined Gothic gold with lifelike figures, arcades drawn in perspective and natural landscapes.

The Crucifixion of about 1420–23, possibly the only work Angelico signed, is set on gold: angels in blue and red fly around the cross, mourners gather at its foot and men on horseback crowd behind. He trained first as an illuminator of manuscripts, and by 1423 he was a friar at San Domenico in Fiesole. In a Coronation of the Virgin believed to be early, perhaps for private prayer, an angel lifts Mary's blue train as she kneels and gold rays stream from Christ.

In the Annunciation from the 1420s, the angel and Mary meet under an arcade with star-flecked blue vaults, and a ray of gold crosses from the left, where Adam and Eve are driven from a garden. His Annunciations set in arcades show his grasp of linear perspective, and it was a subject he painted often.

In 1436 he moved to San Marco in Florence, where Cosimo de' Medici became his patron and each friar's cell was given a fresco matched to the shape of its window. Cosimo's altarpiece for the church, commissioned in 1438, included the Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian. In The Healing of Palladia by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, of about 1438–40, the two saints in red caps tend a woman in bed, and at the right one takes a straw-coloured box from a woman at a doorway. All the works below are religious paintings, most from the 1420s and 1430s.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo del Prado.