Thebaid

For a long time nobody could say who painted this. It came to the Uffizi in 1783 as the work of Gherardo Starnina, and over the next century it was handed round to one name after another before Roberto Longhi, in 1940, tied it to the young Fra Angelico, near the start of his career around 1418. The subject is the Thebaid, the stretch of Egyptian desert near Thebes where the early Christian hermits went to live alone. Across a pale rocky landscape Angelico scatters dozens of tiny monks, each caught in a separate moment, praying, reading, tending a fire, meeting a lion, carrying a small body to burial.