菲耶索莱祭坛画

This is among the earliest known works of Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar who painted for his own order, made around 1424 for the high altar of the friary church at San Domenico in Fiesole, in the hills above Florence. It shows the Virgin and Child enthroned among angels and four saints, among them Thomas Aquinas and the friars' founder, Saint Dominic. What you see now, though, is not quite what Angelico left. In 1501, three-quarters of a century later, the painter Lorenzo di Credi was hired to modernize it. He stripped away the pointed Gothic arches and the gold ground and painted in the deep landscape and columned setting that were fashionable by then. So the figures are early Renaissance and the space around them is High Renaissance, laid over the same panel.