It was a week before the opening of a blockbuster exhibition featuring the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, and the Palazzo Strozzi in central Florence was humming with art handlers, technicians, restorers and museum directors who had come to see how their loans had fared while traveling.
Works were coming in from some 70 lenders, including panels from altarpieces that had been dismantled when Napoleon suppressed Italy’s convents some 200 years ago, setting off a shopping spree for Renaissance-art hungry collectors from around the world.
“Fra Angelico,” which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 25, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year. Bringing together more than 140 works in two venues, it hopes to cement Fra Angelico’s reputation as an A-list Renaissance master, given that the artist “has not always gotten full attention from the view of the broader public,” said the exhibition’s chief curator, Carl Brandon Strehlke.
“Despite the fact that the exhibition is full of new scholarly material and insights about his works,” Strehlke added, “this exhibition is really for the public” to better appreciate Angelico’s voluminous output.
On one wall in Palazzo Strozzi last Wednesday, the central panel of the artist’s “San Marco Altarpiece,” originally executed for the high altar of the Florentine convent dedicated to that saint, was waiting for its long-lost appendages. Depicting the “Virgin and Child with Angels and Saints,” that panel had never strayed far from the convent. But its side panels had passed through the collections of Bavarian kings, Italian tenors, Florentine dealers, French counts and Gilded Age collectors in the United States to eventually wind up in sundry museums.
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