Crocifissione con san Domenico orante

This began as a wall. Fra Angelico painted it around 1438 in the refectory of the convent of San Domenico at Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, where the friars ate their meals under the gaze of a kneeling Saint Dominic at the foot of the cross. Angelico was himself a Dominican friar of that house, so he was painting for the men he lived and prayed beside. Centuries later, after the convent was suppressed during the Napoleonic period, the fresco was detached from its wall and taken to France, which is how a meal-room painting from a Tuscan hillside now hangs in the Louvre. Dominic looks up, alone, hands pressed together.