Retábulo de Bosco ai Frati

Around 1450 Cosimo de' Medici, by then effectively the ruler of Florence, paid for this altarpiece for a small Franciscan convent at Bosco ai Frati, up in the Mugello hills where his family had its roots. Fra Angelico had just come back from Rome, where he had frescoed a private chapel for the pope, and you can feel it in the setting. The enthroned Virgin sits before sober classical columns rather than a plain field of gold. Saints gather close around her, among them Francis and the Dominican friar Peter Martyr. It is a calm, ordered picture from a friar-painter near the end of his career, made for a patron he knew well, in a corner of the countryside that mattered to that family.