Piercing of Christ's Side

In the late 1430s Cosimo de' Medici paid to rebuild the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, hiring the architect Michelozzo. When the friars moved in, Fra Angelico, a Dominican himself, and his workshop painted a single scene on the wall of each small cell. These were not decoration. A friar slept and prayed alone in his cell, and the image gave his mind one thing to hold. Here the crucified Christ has just been pierced in the side by a soldier's lance, and Saint Dominic, the order's founder, kneels at the foot of the cross and embraces it. Placing Dominic in a scene from centuries before his own life was deliberate. It invited the friar to do the same, to stand inside the event rather than look at it. The colours are quiet and the ground bare, so nothing competes with the two figures a man was meant to face every day.