Angelico of Death

a look at: a Florentine lamentation

At the extraordinarily good exhibition of Fra Angelico in Florence it might have been that I didn’t want to leave, but I lingered at the very last, a Lamentation.

Angelico has arranged a group of saints around the dead figure of Christ outside Jerusalem. I think it’s unusual for a picture of this kind, but like the compositions misleadingly known as sacre conversazioni (sacred conversations; misleading because nobody’s ever talking in them) this Lamentation gathers saints who could never have been together on earth because they lived at different times.

Unbothered by historical accuracy, Angelico paints them as if they are present at the great and tragic event. Perhaps it’s because they have the benefit of hindsight, but several of the anachronistic saints don’t look too sad to see the dead Christ, although the Virgin displays a mother’s depth of feeling that would perhaps be the same whether she knew what was going to happen next or not.

Behind the human figures, whose repeated spiritual inhabitation of this event has granted them figurative proximity to it in the hands of the painter, there is another repetitive element: the city wall. The painting was made for a charitable group who looked after convicts awaiting the death penalty, and Angelico’s wall is full of the harshness of civic life.

It is a blank, hard grey and somehow terrible in its perspectival regularity. The intervals between the identical buttresses get smaller as they recede into the distance, telling us that the gaps are equal in size, in correspondence with the regular dimensions of the juxtaposed execution apparatuses, ladder and crucifix. This is very much in contrast with the saints, who have an array of lively characteristics, bright colours and gold haloes.

The wall, behind which life presumably carries on as normal, is eloquent as a representation of indifference in the face of tragedy. Preferring to expend his energy on the saints, Angelico has succinctly shown the coldness of the world wrapped in its own affairs; a world which is, for all the implied variety within it (the visible buildings are modelled on ones in Florence), drably uniform in its hostility toward the lives deemed not to count.

Outside the city, as Angelico makes clear, it may be rather empty, and it may seem terribly sad, but that’s where you’ll find the real stuff of life; and the ending might even be better than we would imagine from where we’re standing today. We would have to time travel like the saints to find out.

Fra Angelico is at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 26 September 2025 - 25 January 2026.