Retable de San Marco

Around 1440 Cosimo de' Medici, the banker who effectively ran Florence, was pouring money into rebuilding the convent of San Marco, and he gave Fra Angelico, a friar of that house, the high altarpiece. What Angelico did with it was quietly new. For centuries such altarpieces had shown saints boxed into separate gold panels, each alone. Here they all stand in one shared space around the enthroned Virgin and Child, turning toward one another as if in conversation, an arrangement later called a sacra conversazione, a holy conversation. Cosimo's own patron saints, the healers Cosmas and Damian, kneel at the front, a discreet Medici signature. The picture has not survived whole. Harsh cleaning centuries ago stripped much of its surface, and the small story-panels from its base are now scattered across Washington, Paris, Munich and Dublin. The main panel still hangs in the convent it was made for, where Angelico also painted the frescoes in the monks' cells upstairs.