During the London Art Week of 2023, Christie’s of London had proposed the sale of a rare Renaissance masterpiece, the Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist, and Mary Magdalene at the Feet of the Cross, unanimously attributed to the early work of the Florentine painter Fra Angelico. Presented as one of the highlights of the Classic Week, with an estimated value of between £4 and £6 million, the work was sold in July of that year to a non-English buyer for £5 million, equivalent to €5.8 million. The work was therefore at risk of leaving the country where it had been for nearly two centuries, acquired by Lord Ashburton and, at his death in 1864, passed to his heirs.
At this point, the Committee for the Review of the Export of Art and Cultural Objects, supported by the Arts Council, intervened, given the great value and importance of the work for the nation. The Committee recommended to temporarily suspend the export license for the work, which was indeed suspended in January 2024. This operation was aimed, in accordance with English law, to give time to a potential public entity to make an offer to acquire the work. This block allowed the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford to express interest in acquiring the work and to collect the necessary funds to keep the painting in the United Kingdom for nine months. In the end, it was a private sale that allowed the Ashmolean to acquire the work for £4.48 millions, collected through grants and donations, with a significant reduction in its market value set at £5 millions.
The painting will be exhibited to the public in the rich Oxford museum for the joy of visitors, students, scholars, and enthusiasts.
The Young Crucifixion by Fra Angelico (Giovanni da Fiesole, born Guido di Pietro; Vicchio, circa 1395 – Rome, 1455) was discovered and published relatively recently by Francis Russell in the Burlington Magazine in May 1996, and it is a beautiful work by this artist who serves as a bridge between the Gothic and the Renaissance, especially in this early phase. The painting is dated around 1420, or more precisely between 1419 and 1424, which is the year he entered the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, founded by the blessed cardinal Dominici, a reformer of the order.
“It was an exciting moment when I realized I was in the presence of one of the first masterpieces of Fra Angelico,” writes Francis Russell: “Every gesture is perfectly weighed. The delicacy of the painter’s use of color is evident in the way the blood of Christ and the pelican above are matched to the dress of Mary Magdalene. With Fra Angelico, nothing is accidental.” The painting also testifies to the profound influence of contemporary sculpture on the painter, particularly Brunelleschi and Ghiberti.
Fra Angelico is certainly one of the first painters to adhere to the new style of Donatello and Brunelleschi, contemporaneously with Masaccio. He was initially a student of another friar, the Camaldolese Lorenzo Monaco, and also of the Starnina, therefore of two champions of international late Gothic art sensitive to the Giottesque lesson. Once he entered the order of preachers, he set up his workshop of miniatures and panels in the Fiesole convent. His style is characterized by the refinement almost maniacal of the details and by the exceptional luminosity of the colors, two characteristics that link to the late Gothic formation but that find a sense also in his Dominican formation. The Dominicans, preachers by excellence, had to be able to transmit to others what they had meditated, and the Angelico does it with painting. It is no coincidence that Vasari tells us that Fra Giovanni never painted if he had not previously prayed. Fra Angelico is capable of uniting elements proper to medieval aesthetics, such as the didactic role of art and the symbolic value of light, with typically Renaissance elements, such as perspective and volumetric rendering. A curiosity: the appellation “Fra Angelico” is already testified in Cristoforo Landino, humanist at the court of the Magnificent, and referred to the beauty of his painting, but ultimately the painter was truly beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982!
Painted around 1420, the Crucifixion would therefore be one of his first works, and it testifies to the power, beauty, and sensitivity for which he would later become known.
There are very few works by Fra Angelico in the public collections of Britain, and it is for this reason that the Review Committee took into consideration its recommendation. Outside of London, indeed, only the Ashmolean conserves a work by the master and his workshop, a triptych with the Virgin and Child with angels and a Dominican saint with Saints Peter and Paul. The Crucifixion will soon be exhibited right next to this, allowing visitors to appreciate how the artist’s style developed throughout his career, and to what extent his delicate and emotional approach was already consolidated in the twenties of the fifteenth century.
The acquisition of the Crucifixion by the Oxford Museum will be the occasion for a complete reinstallation of the galleries of the museum dedicated to Italian Renaissance art, which have not been exhibited since 2009. The acquisition of the Crucifixion highlights the role of the Ashmolean as an important center for the study of Italian Renaissance art. And then, the Crucifixion will also serve as a didactic resource for the University of Oxford, where it will be of particular interest not only for the departments of Art History and History, but also for the Department of Theology and Religion and for Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican community founded in 1221 located next to the Ashmolean.
In September 2025 an epochal exhibition on Fra Angelico is announced at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, will the Crucifixion be exposed?
In the meantime, Art-Test is working on three diagnostic campaigns on three works that will be the among the highlights of the exhibition. For now we cannot add more!
