The story
Masaccio was born in San Giovanni Valdarno in 1401, and the small museum beside the town's main basilica keeps his family close. Here hang panels by his younger brother Giovanni, the painter nicknamed Lo Scheggia, and by Mariotto di Cristofano, who married into the family, alongside the Florentines Domenico di Michelino and Jacopo del Sellaio. Most of these pictures came from churches and convents in the town and the surrounding valley.
The work people travel for is an Annunciation by Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar and painter. It is one of his three Annunciations on panel, with those in the Prado and in Cortona, and it came from the Franciscan convent of Montecarlo, a few kilometres outside town. Scholars date it between about 1430 and 1440.
The basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie itself was begun in 1484, after a local wonder remembered as the miracle of Monna Tancia, a grandmother said to have been able to nurse her orphaned grandson during a plague. Since a rearrangement in 2019, the old altar of the oratory has been rebuilt in the museum's 17th-century hall.
