Fra Angelico, today

SERIES: Travels and stays of artists in Rome
SPEAKER: Carl Brandon Strehlke, art historian
DATE: Thursday, November 21, 6 p.m.

In 1955, major exhibitions celebrating the Florentine Renaissance painter Fra Giovanni da Fiesole were held in Rome's Vatican and Florence on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death in Rome's Minerva Convent. A Dominican friar, he was known by members of his own order since shortly after his death as Blessed Angelicus, just as the theologian Thomas Aquinas was called Doctor Angelicus. In the 1960s the great writer Elsa Morante asked: was Fra Giovanni a revolutionary? After the 1955 exhibition and from Elsa Morante's provocative question we look at the friar's art in a new way. This will be the topic of the conference: how we see Beato Angelico today in relation to the artistic and religious society of his time. And to answer Elsa Morante's question: yes, he was a revolutionary. 

Carl Brandon Strehlke, born and raised in Boston, completed his studies at Columbia University in New York and worked for thirty-five years as curator of the John G. Johnson Collection of European Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He curated exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Philadelphia and New York on St. Francis, Sienese Renaissance painting, Beato Angelico, Pontormo and Bronzino. He also wrote the catalog of the Johnson Collection and, with Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, the catalog of the Bernard and Mary Berenson at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. He is currently working on an upcoming exhibition on Fra Angelico for Palazzo Strozzi in Florence that will open in September 2025.

Free admission while seats last.

Reservations at the link.