First large scale exhibition of Fra Angelico for fifty years
(25 Oct 2005) SHOTLIST
1. Exterior of Metropolitan Museum of Art covered in scaffolding
2. Close-up of sign outside announcing exhibit
3. Wide shot of gallery
4. Various shots of Fra Angelico's "The Virgin of Humility" (1436-38)
5. Mid shot of Fra Angelico and Zanobi Strozzi's "Saint Nicholas Calms a Tempest at Sea: the Miracle of the Ration of Grain" (circa 1437)
7. Mid shot, zoom to close-up of Fra Angelico's "Christ Crowned with Thorns" (1438-39)
8. SOUNDBITE: (English) Laurence Kanter, Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art:
"Fra Angelico is simply one of the greatest artists who's ever lived, and also one of the most popular, therefore, none of us every really hoped that we could succeed in attracting as many paintings as this on loan. It's a great, fortunate occasion to bring them all together in one place."
9. Fra Angelico's "The Annunciatory Angel" (circa 1429-30) pan to Fra Angelico's "The Virgin Annunciate" (circa 1429-30)
10. Two panels of Fra Angelico's "Angel in Adoration" (1429-30)
11. Zoom out from "The Annunciatory Angel" (circa 1423-24) to show below it "Saint Francis and a Bishop Saint Zenobius" (circa 1423-24), and to the right, above, is "The Virgin Annunciate" (circa 1423-24) and below it is "Saint John the Baptist and Saint Dominic"
12. Pan of gallery
STORYLINE:
The first American retrospective devoted to the work of the great Italian Renaissance artist known as Fra Angelico (1390/5-1455) will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 26.
The exhibition will be the first large-scale presentation of the artist's work assembled anywhere in the world in half a century.
More than fifty public institutions and private collections in Europe and America are participating in the landmark exhibition, which commemorates the 550th anniversary of the artist's death.
"Fra Angelico" features some 75 paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations from throughout his career, supplemented by forty-five additional works by his assistants and closest followers.
Highlights of the exhibition include recently discovered paintings and new attributions, paintings never before displayed publicly, and reconstructed groupings of works, some of them reunited for the first time.
Born in the countryside north of Florence, Guido di Pietro was already an established artist when he joined the Dominican order sometime between 1419 and 1422, taking for himself the name Fra Giovanni.
He received commissions for important altarpieces from his own monastery, San Domenico, in Fiesole, from other Dominican houses in Florence, Cortona, and Perugia, and from religious institutions as far away as Brescia in the north of Italy and Orvieto and Rome to the south.
Known for his pious treatment of religious subjects - which he portrayed with psychological insight and a compelling realism - Fra Giovanni was first called "pictor angelicus," the Angelic Painter, shortly after his death in 1455.
The name came to be rendered in English as Fra Angelico.
In 1984, Fra Angelico was beatified - the first step in the process toward sainthood - by Pope John Paul II, who also decreed him the patron of artists.
Much of Angelico's enduring popularity rests on his frescoes - especially those painted in the dormitory cells at the convent of San Marco in Florence - and on altarpieces too large to be safely transported.
Instead, the exhibition will bring together a nearly complete selection of his works of smaller scale, presenting the entire range of the development of his talent over the full course of his career.
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