The Crucifixion

When Fra Angelico painted this small Crucifixion, probably in the early 1420s, he was a young Dominican friar in Florence, and the talk of the city was a set of bronze doors. Lorenzo Ghiberti had won the commission for the Baptistery doors a few years earlier, and their crowded gilded scenes, each set inside a curving quatrefoil frame, were what every Florentine artist was studying. You can feel that here. Angelico packs the mourners, the Roman soldiers and their horses into a tight ring around the cross, a curving, crowded arrangement that owes a great deal to Ghiberti's panels. The picture was made for private prayer, small enough to kneel before, and it carries his signature, which is unusual, since very little from his hand is signed at all. The Virgin folds at the knees as the women catch her, and gold leaf still stands in for the sky behind Golgotha.