Le Couronnement de la Vierge

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar as well as a painter, and he made this altarpiece in the 1430s for his own order. The scene is the moment Christ sets a crown on his mother's head in heaven, and Angelico stages it high up, on a flight of steps set against a plain field of gold leaf, so the whole event floats free of any earthly ground. Around it kneel ranks of saints and angels, each face turned toward the centre. What was new here was not the gold, which was old-fashioned even then, but the order beneath it. Angelico was working in Florence just as younger artists were learning to build space by perspective, and he lets those receding steps pull your eye up toward the crowning while keeping the sacred gold background his teachers used. The colours are laid on with a jeweller's care, clear blues and rose against the gold. It hangs today in the Uffizi.