In Florence, an exhibition that tells the story of Beato Angelico

From September 26 to January 25, 2026, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Museo San Marco will retrace the history and influences of the artist.

One of the most beautiful exhibitions of the fall is the result of an important collaboration: from September 26 to January 25, 2026, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco will showcase Beato Angelico through an exhibition dedicated to the artist who symbolizes 15th-century art. The exhibition explores the production, development, and influence of Beato Angelico's art and his relationships with painters such as Lorenzo Monaco, Masaccio, and Filippo Lippi, as well as sculptors such as Lorenzo.

Ghiberti, Michelozzo, and Luca della Robbia. Beato Angelico is the first major exhibition in Florence dedicated to the artist exactly seventy years after the 1955 monographic exhibition and offers a unique opportunity to explore the extraordinary artistic vision of the painter friar in relation to a profound religious sense, based on a meditation on the sacred in connection with the human.

The exhibition brings together over 140 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and miniatures from prestigious museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Vatican Museums, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as well as Italian and international libraries and collections, churches, and local institutions. The result of over four years of preparation, the project has made possible an undertaking of exceptional scientific value and cultural importance.

Beato Angelico, exhibition views, Palazzo Strozzi e Museo di San Marco (photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio)

How the Beato Angelico exhibition is developing

At Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition presents some of Beato Angelico's most important masterpieces, offering an in-depth look at his fundamental influence on Renaissance art, his collaborations with other artists, and his ties to the great patron families of the time, as well as to numerous Florentine institutions, both religious and secular. The exhibition highlights Angelico's skill in constructing complex and refined narratives, combined with an extraordinary attention to detail, also highlighting the influence of Flemish art. Key works in the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi include the large altarpieces commissioned in Florence and beyond the borders of Tuscany, with ample space dedicated to Angelico's work in Rome to highlight his contribution to the humanistic ideals of the time and his relationship with the Medici family through masterpieces that reflect the cultured and forward-thinking patronage of the Florentine family.

Beato Angelico, exhibition views, Palazzo Strozzi e Museo di San Marco (photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio)

The project, in its chronological and philological order, finds its essential starting point in the Museum of San Marco, a former Dominican convent where there is a deep and intrinsic relationship with Beato Angelico. Here, the painter created a cycle of paintings and frescoes that laid the foundations for the Florentine Renaissance, in which spirituality and artistic vision merge at the highest level. In this extraordinary context, unique in the world, Beato Angelico's frescoes unfold from the ground floor through the cloister of Sant'Antonino and the Chapter House. The absolute highlight is the Annunciation, one of the most famous images of Renaissance art and emblem of Angelico's painting, which welcomes visitors as they climb to the upper floor to walk through the corridors and convent cells frescoed by the master and his collaborators, the culmination of an exhibition itinerary that encompasses all the frescoes present here.

The library designed by Michelozzo, the first public library of the modern era, houses miniatures by Beato Angelico, his circle, and his predecessors. Next to it are precious humanistic manuscripts with texts by authors of antiquity and the Church Fathers, belonging to the library's collection at the time of Angelico, allowing us to recreate the cultural atmosphere in which the artist worked and emphasizing the intellectual and spiritual role of the convent.

In the Sala del Beato Angelico, on the ground floor, fundamental works documenting the artist's early career are presented, highlighting his leading contribution to the transition from late Gothic painting, with masters such as Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco, to Renaissance painting, pioneered by Masaccio's innovative style, but for which Angelico also laid the foundations with his pictorial genius. Alongside the works of the young friar painter, important works by contemporary artists, including Masaccio, Masolino, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, will also be on display.