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Att to Gherardo di Jacopo Starnina, Lorenzo Monaco and currently Fra Angelico, , The Thebaid, c.
1410, Tempera on wood, 80 x 216 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
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In addition to excavating the historical record, stylistic
analysis of specific works has tried to re-construct Angelico’s artistic
origins. At the centre of this debate is a unique and brilliant panel that has
been assigned to three painters over the years: Starnina, Lorenzo Monaco and
Fra Angelico himself. According to Antal, the Uffizi Thebaid- a scene of
hermits escaping into the Egyptian desert around Thebes- was painted by
Starnina after his return from Spain about 1404, after fleeing from Florence
after being implicated in a popular uprising. For Antal, the depiction of
monastic hermits in the wilderness was the “observant ideal of life, seen
somewhat from the angle of the lower middle class, which finds expression in
Starnina much more than Lorenzo Monaco.”[1]
Later evaluations of the picture placed the style as learnt in the circle of
Lorenzo Monaco, in the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was only in
the 20th century that the panel was attributed to Angelico himself,
by Roberto Longhi in 1940; although as Strehlke points out, the picture “shows
such a close dependence on Lorenzo Monaco that a model by him may stand behind
it.”[2]
More recently scholars like Lawrence Kanter have promoted the Thebaid
unreservedly to a Fra Angelico autograph piece, along with several other panels
in the Met and at Princeton, albeit with some reservations about Kanter’s
arguments.[3]
[1] Frederick
Antal, Florentine Painting and its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic
before Cosimo de Medici’s Advent to Power: XIV and Early XV Centuries, (New
York, 1948), 321.
[2] Strehlke,
“Fra Angelico Studies,” in Illustration in Florentine Painting 26.
[3] Pia
Palladino, “Pilgrims and Desert Fathers” in exh. cat’, Fra Angelico, Lawrence
Kanter and Pia Palladino,Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005.
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