St Lawrence Distributing Alms

Fra Angelico painted this on the wall of a tiny private chapel in the Vatican, around 1447, for a brand-new pope, Nicholas V, a scholar who was then founding the library that still bears his collection. The subject is Lawrence, a deacon of third-century Rome. Ordered by the city's prefect to hand over the treasures of the Church, Lawrence spent them instead: he gathered the poor, the blind and the crippled, and told the prefect that these were the Church's real riches. For that he was put to death. Angelico, himself a Dominican friar, sets the giving in a calm, sunlit hall of rounded arches, the new architecture of his own century rather than ancient Rome. Lawrence stands in a gold-embroidered deacon's robe, dropping coins into the outstretched hands of a crowd, a mother with a baby among them. A young painter named Benozzo Gozzoli was at his side on the scaffolding, learning the trade.