Saint Dominic adoring the Crucifixion

This was never meant to be looked at the way we look at it now. Fra Angelico painted it in the early 1440s inside San Marco, a Florentine convent his own Dominican order was rebuilding with Medici money. Cosimo de' Medici paid for the work, partly to ease his conscience about how he had made his fortune. The friar-painter covered the corridors and the small sleeping cells with frescoes meant as tools for prayer, plain enough not to distract. Here Saint Dominic, the order's founder, kneels at the foot of the cross with his book set down, in exactly the posture of devotion the friars were meant to take up themselves. Fra Angelico was a friar too, and he painted these walls for the men he prayed alongside.