Angelico The Documents

This book is the first complete collection of known documents concerning one of the greatest painters of the 15th century: Fra Angelico. From conventual memoirs to payment registers, the surviving archival testimonies produced during his life are brought together and re-discussed in order to offer a clear picture of what we know and what we can suppose of his artistic activity and religious career. They have been carefully reread and retranscribed to allow the reader to directly engage with Fra Angelico's historical reality, be it his relationships with clients, collaborators, family members, or brothers. The transcriptions are accompanied by an introductory essay on the problems posed by archival research on the artist, that led to unexpected discoveries, such as those on the Niccolina Chapel at the State Archive in Rome. This initiative, born as a complement to the major Florentine exhibition on the painter (Palazzo Strozzi/Museo di San Marco, 26 September 2025 – 25 January 2026), aims to offer a tool to retrace and re-examine the remaining pieces of the complex mosaic of documents that recounted the life of Angelico.