Vierge à l'Enfant

Fra Angelico painted this Madonna around 1435 straight onto the wall of the Dominican convent at San Domenico, near Florence, where he was himself a friar. It was not made to be sold or hung. It was made for the monks who passed it every day, a quiet image to stop and pray before. Then history moved it. When Napoleon's troops suppressed the Italian convents, the fresco was cut away from its wall, and you can still feel it is a fragment, the figures pressed to the very edges and a saint sliced off at one side. Sold on by the French, it travelled all the way to Saint Petersburg, and a wall-painting meant never to leave a Florentine hillside now hangs in the Hermitage.