Capolavoro per Milano 2023: Beato Angelico

The “Capolavoro per Milano 2023” (Masterpiece for Milan 2023), an initiative now in its 15th year, will be the extraordinary compartment of the “Armadio degli Argenti” painted by Beato Angelico: a complex work from the Museo di San Marco in Florence dedicated to the “Stories of the Infancy of Christ”, from the “Annunciation” to the “Dispute among the Doctors”, introduced by the “Vision of Ezekiel”.
Commissioned in 1448 by Piero Cosimo de’ Medici, the panel painted between 1450 and 1452, a period when Fra Angelico was at the height of his career, presents a very rich narrative sequence, a veritable illustrated Bible, in which all the episodes are framed, at the top, by a scroll with an Old Testament prophecy and, at the bottom, by the quotation of the corresponding Gospel.
In this miniature pictorial cycle, with its light-soaked atmospheres and dazzling colors characteristic of Angelico, stand out the delicate “Annunciation”, one of the painter’s favorite themes in which the dialogue between the Angel with multicolored wings and the Virgin in humble prayer takes place in a humanistic loggia, the intimate and intense “Nativity”, with an extraordinary effect of artificial light, and the “Circumcision”, set in a temple that also reveals the painter’s updating on the architectural innovations of the time.