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Look down at the small blue cloud under his feet, then up at the black T-shaped mark on his cloak and the halo tooled into the gold.
Saint Anthony Abbot, a hermit of fourth-century Egypt, was honored as the founder of Christian monastic life. This narrow panel comes from the high altarpiece that Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned for San Marco, the Dominican convent in Florence where Fra Angelico lived as a friar. It was one of ten saints standing on clouds beside the main picture until the altarpiece was taken apart by the early 1800s.
Tempera on panel · 39.4 × 14 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Renaissance · Late Gothic and Early Renaissance
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Saint Anthony Abbot
- Artist
- Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro; Italian, c. 1395/1400–1455)
- Date
- 1440–41
- Medium
- Tempera on panel
- Dimensions
- 39.4 × 14 cm (15 1/2 × 5 1/2 in.); Framed: 70.5 × 42.6 × 7 cm (27 3/4 × 16 3/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Elizabeth Iglehart Blair
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Renaissance c. 1300–1600
View in the AtlasGaller’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.