The story
San Domenico is first of all a Dominican convent and church, on the slope between Florence and the hill town of Fiesole. One of its friars in the 1420s was the painter later known as Fra Angelico, and before he moved down to the convent of San Marco in Florence he made the high altarpiece for this church.
The Fiesole Altarpiece shows the Virgin and Child enthroned among angels, with Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Peter Martyr and Saint Barnabas, the namesake of a Florentine donor who paid for work on the convent. Part of what you see is a later layer. In 1501 the painter Lorenzo di Credi brought it up to date, replacing the gold background and Gothic points with a canopied throne, painted architecture and two glimpses of landscape between pillars. The small panels from its base, the predella, were bought by London's National Gallery in 1860 and are still there.
A recent restoration paid for by Friends of Florence revealed how Angelico's own throne looked beneath Credi's work, and in 2026 the altarpiece came back to the church after being shown at a major Fra Angelico exhibition.
