The Coronation of the Virgin
Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro) (c. 1395/1400-1455) · c. 1430-1435
At the top of a flight of nine marble steps, Christ places a crown on the head of his kneeling mother while a crowd of saints, martyrs and angels presses in from both sides to watch. Saints identifiable by their attributes fill the foreground: Mary Magdalene with her jar of ointment, Catherine with her wheel, Dominic in the black and white Dominican habit, Louis of Toulouse in a bishop's cope. Angels kneel on the lower steps playing trumpets and stringed instruments. Below runs a predella of seven small scenes from the life and posthumous miracles of Saint Dominic, including the moment he is said to have raised a young man from the dead.
Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar as well as a painter, and the picture is a piece of Florentine early Renaissance engineering as much as a devotional image. The staircase functions as a perspective device, pulling the eye up a measurable recession while distributing the figures in clear ranks so that no head blocks another. The colour is a jeweller's palette of lapis blue, rose and mint green set against burnished gold, and the haloes are punched and tooled so that they catch the light as you move. Look at the fabric of the crowded copes and how each fold is described with a separate tone rather than a smudge.
Painted for the convent church of San Domenico in Fiesole, just outside Florence, where Fra Angelico himself took his vows, the panel was later acquired for the French royal collection and passed into the Louvre. Fra Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982, which makes this one of the rare Louvre masterpieces whose author is officially a blessed of the Catholic Church.
Did You Know? Fra Angelico was beatified in 1982 and later named the patron of artists, so the painter of this altarpiece is himself venerated as Blessed John of Fiesole.
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