The renaissance of a twelfth-century papal manuscript fragment in Medici Florence: a new reading of Fra Angelico’s David

Abstract

Of the small corpus of works on vellum and paper attributed to the Tuscan Dominican friar and artist Fra Angelico (c.1400–55) and his circle, one drawing has been repeatedly singled out as widely accepted to be by his hand: King David Playing a Psaltery (c.1430) (now British Museum, London). The vellum leaf on which Fra Angelico drew features text on its verso that has until now been misunderstood as a fragment of a fifteenth-century breviary, leading it to be positioned simply as an example of his work as an illuminator. This article demonstrates that despite this misunderstanding, there is indeed an important relationship between the text and image on this sheet. The text is a fragment of a twelfth-century choir psalter and is significant as perhaps the oldest surviving evidence of the liturgy of the Papal Curia. Through a combination of palaeographical, liturgical, and art-historical analysis, I identify the leaf as a central Italian fragment dating to c.1150–80, which Fra Angelico encountered as a result of the presence of the Papal Curia in Florence during the papacy of Eugene IV, from 1434 to 1436 and again from 1439 to 1443. Stylistic and iconographic analysis demonstrates that Fra Angelico deliberately evoked the antique mode of the prefatory miniature in response to the age of the leaf, making the drawing an early example of the Renaissance desire to emulate classical models, received through a Carolingian filter. The close relationship between the David drawing and Fra Angelico’s work for Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell in San Marco—after the latter’s return to Florence from exile in 1434, supported by Eugene IV—is identified for the first time. The date of the drawing is refined from c.1430 to c.1435, the year Fra Angelico and his community moved from Fiesole to San Marco in Florence.