Fra Angelico1440
The Virgin of Humility
Mary seated on the ground (the iconography of humility) holding the Child. The gold ground still reads the Virgin as Queen even as the pose reads her as handmaid.
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About Fra Angelico
1395–1455 · Italian
Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro; Beato Angelico) was a Dominican friar of San Domenico (Fiesole) and later San Marco (Florence). His gold-ground panel altarpieces (the Prado and Cortona Annunciations, the Linaioli Tabernacle, the Louvre Coronation) and the small meditative frescoes he painted in the cells of San Marco — begun in 1438 under Prior Antoninus — made him the defining early Renaissance painter of contemplative prayer. He painted the Chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican Palace between 1447 and 1449. Beatified in 1982.