Angelico - by Maximillian Hernandez (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The volume is the first complete collection of documents, accompanied by an introductory essay, about Fra Angelico, one of the most important painters of the fifteenth century.

This book is the first complete collection of known documents concerning one of the greatest painters of the 15th century: Fra Angelico. From conventual memoirs to payment registers, the surviving archival testimonies produced during his life are brought together and re-discussed in order to offer a clear picture of what we know and what we can suppose of his artistic activity and religious career. They have been carefully reread and retranscribed to allow the reader to directly engage with Fra Angelico's historical reality, be it his relationships with clients, collaborators, family members, or brothers. The transcriptions are accompanied by an introductory essay on the problems posed by archival research on the artist, that led to unexpected discoveries, such as those on the Niccolina Chapel at the State Archive in Rome.
This initiative, born as a complement to the major Florentine exhibition on the painter (Palazzo Strozzi/Museo di San Marco, 26 September 2025 - 25 January 2026), aims to offer a tool to retrace and re-examine the remaining pieces of the complex mosaic of documents that recounted the life of Angelico.

About the Author

Maximillian Hernandez (Worcester, 1993) is a PhD candidate in art history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Author of dozens of scientific publications on the art and culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, he has collaborated on various exhibitions including Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence (Washington DC, 2020); Canova: Sketching in Clay (Washington DC-Chicago, 2023-24) and Beato Angelico (Florence 2025-26). Among his various awards, he is the winner of a Rome Prize Fellowship (American Academy in Rome) for the 2026-27 academic year.