El Descendimiento

This altarpiece began as someone else's job. The banker Palla Strozzi, one of the richest men in Florence and a rival of the Medici, had commissioned it for his family chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, and the older painter Lorenzo Monaco had started it before dying around 1425. Monaco had laid out the panel the usual way, split into three separate scenes by painted columns. When Fra Angelico took it over in the early 1430s, he pulled the columns out and painted one continuous space instead, so the mourners lowering Christ from the cross stand in a single sunlit landscape that carries the eye back toward a walled town. That deep, open background was a new thing to attempt in Florence at the time. Angelico was a Dominican friar working just as his order took over the convent of San Marco, where the painting hangs today, a few steps from the cells he later frescoed. The pale hill town in the distance is modeled on the real towers of contemporary Tuscany.