Fra Angelico Exhibit at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Connecting Point Mar 22 2018

Renaissance painter Fra Angelico has been a favorite of popes from the 1400s to John Paul II, and for the first time in 200 years, four of his most significant works are reunited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Connecting Point's Jared Bowen takes us on a trip to see the exhibit. This is where you come to experience the divine. In a setting as solemn as its subject matter, you'll find four depictions of seminal moments in the Virgin Mary's life. We see here really a miraculous event. For the first time in 200 years, we see these four magnificent reliquaries reunited. They were painted in Florence in the 1400s. Reliquaries to showcase the relics of saints and minutely carved chambers. Nathaniel Silver is the curator of this Renaissance masterpiece show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. When we talk about relics, we mean fragments of bone, pieces of skin, strands of hair, so relatively invisible and tiny. And so the work of the reliquary is really to enshrine, to honor, and to glorify these holy fragments contained within. And that's what Fra Angelico did. He glorified them with his magnificent paintings. Fra Angelico was one of the most acclaimed and sought-after painters of his day. By his late teens, he'd racked up commissions from the Florence elite. And by his 20s, he was working for the Pope. Getting a commission from the Pope was the ultimate imprimatur of success. Fra Angelico's patrons and fellow artists all agreed he could paint like no other. Look at his shimmering painting titled Paradise, featuring 87 saintly figures. It's on loan from Florence's Uffizi Gallery. And this is the first time it's ever appeared in the United States. I hope that this shows up as well on television as it does here in person. But describe for me what his use of gold, what kind of environment that creates in this scene. This painting sparkles with the dazzle of heaven. The Virgin and Christ are almost depicted as if they are the source of illumination in this painting. And that light spreads out for them in visible rays. And you can see the trouble he's taken in these hundreds of etched lines into the surface. These lines are what light up the painting as you're walking by it. They actually make the figures come alive. Fra Angelico painted the Reliquaries at roughly the same time. By then, he had joined a Dominican order, taking a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience while devoting his life to art. His name when he entered the order was Guido di Pietro. It wasn't until after his death that he became Fra Angelico. Fra Angelico was dubbed the angelic painter. It's singling him out as a painter intellectual of legendary proportions. The Reliquaries had similar significance. Sacrosanct, they were typically kept locked away. The general public could see them only during rare celebrations and never together. It was only the most esteemed visitors, somebody like the Pope coming to visit, who would have actually had the experience of seeing them all at once, all in the same place. So the experience we're offering you here is actually an experience fit for a Pope, essentially, the very VIP experience. The exhibition was inspired by this Reliquary, the Gardner Museum's own and the only one to have left its home in Florence. It depicts the Virgin Mary's ascent into heaven amid a chorus of festive angels. They actually seem to be revolving around the Virgin, who acts as a kind of pivot for this entire scene. This is fascinating because it means that they're actually creating a kind of vortex, a sort of celestial disturbance. And you get the sense of the movement of the air in the finest details on her cloak, the sense that the angels themselves are actually propelling the Virgin upwards into heaven, and it's their activity which is actually sending her skywards. This is totally new. No one's done this before. Isabella Stuart Gardner acquired the Reliquary at a pivotal moment in her own life, just after the death of her husband, and as she was deciding whether to proceed with plans to build her museum. It was her trusted art advisor, Bernard Berenson, who dashed off a letter from Florence imploring her to buy the Renaissance masterpiece. One of the loveliest ever painted, he wrote. She writes back to Berenson and says, yes, even though it's very expensive, I'm going to go for it. And it was a prescient decision. It became the first painting by Fra Angelico in the United States. Its arrival was covered by newspapers. Today, it is one of the most pristine Fra Angelico's in existence, says Gardner chief conservator Gianfranco Pocobene. They weren't objects that were being used a lot, so that helps a lot. What we seem to understand from our picture is that probably it looks like over the last 200 years it was behind glass. X-rays the museum commissioned revealed pieces of wood were added to the Reliquary in the 1800s to make it look more like a painting, as it was displayed in its English home before Gardner purchased it. Pocobene removed the wood to restore the Reliquary to Fra Angelico's original creation. You'd be surprised how many objects have been altered in very significant ways to suit collectors' tastes. Now it is as it was, and his Reliquaries are as they were. On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult was it to pull off all of the reunions that you've done here? 11. It was a lot of negotiating, a lot of meetings, and, well, you just try to be as polite and determined as possible.