Fra Angelico’s Christ’s Presentation in the Temple (1440s) at San Marco in Florence has been discussed primarily in terms of its iconography and connoisseurship. Here, sparked by the composition’s female figure, whose identity and ­function remain obscure, alternative approaches will be suggested: gender studies as a mediation of social goals, and the collective memory of the site-specific audience. Both approaches explore concerns held by the reformed Observant branch of the Dominican Order, to which Fra Angelico belonged, and for whom he painted the image.


Fra Angelico’s fresco belongs to a cycle of more than fifty paintings he created for the Dominican Order of San Marco, visible to the public only since the closure of the friars’ residential complex in 1866 and its restructuring as a museum in 1869. The friars belonged to the reformed Observant branch of the order, which advocated a strict return to Saint Dominic’s founding principles of apostolic poverty and preaching. The leader of the reform movement, Giovanni Dominici, established the core group of friars, which included Antonino Pierozzi, at San Domenico in Fiesole in 1406. There they shared his rigorous austerity and a spirituality much indebted to Catherine of Siena (c. 1347–1380, canonized in 1461), who had inspired Dominici’s vision. Some of the friars relocated in the 1430s to San Marco, where they were better able to conduct their ministry within the heart of urban Florence. 


The audience for whom Fra Angelico intended his San Marco paintings, then, were his deeply spiritual, reform-oriented brethren Observants. This discussion will focus on their probable reception of the Presentation in cell ten along the east corridor of the first floor of the convent’s dormitory. This fresco constitutes one of the first twenty completed in the convent, renovated by Michelozzo di Bartolommeo sometime after 1436, and paid for by Cosimo de’ Medici. The Presentation is one of the most stunning paintings to have emerged from the restorations of the San Marco fresco cycle.


Fra Angelico created a traditional Presentation with respect to its depiction of Mary and Joseph presenting Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem at the time of Mary’s postpartum purification in accordance with Mosaic law. They stand on a platform before a simple, flaming altar set off by a shell niche, which although damaged, retains the classical simplicity that Michelozzo’s architecture for the convent inspired in Fra Angelico’s paintings. Mary has given the swaddled child to Simeon, the elderly Jew identified...