Waiting for Beato Angelico

From September 26 until January 25, 2026, the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation and the Museo di San Marco present "Beato Angelico," the first major exhibition in Florence dedicated to the artist in seventy years.
This unmissable exhibition, outcome of four years of work and preparation, is a unique opportunity to rediscover Beato Angelico, an artist capable of bringing a profoundly human and spiritual dimension to painting.

Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Fra' Beato Angelico, was among the most important Italian painters of the first half of the 15th century. It is in Florence that we can admire the majority of his works, many of which are housed in the Museo di San Marco, the convent where the famous friar-painter lived.
Drawing on the legacy of the late Gothic period, Beato Angelico is known for leading Florentine and Italian painting into the Renaissance, distinguishing himself for his innovative use of perspective and his unprecedented use of light to define the relationship between figures and the surrounding space. 

The exhibition aims to highlight the innovations the painter introduced to the art of his time and the exceptional quality of his painting, while also highlighting the profound religious significance of his art.
Through a dialogue between the two museums that host the exhibition (Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco), the exhibit explores the stylistic evolution, legacy and impact of Beato Angelico's art, comparing it with some of his most important contemporaries. The exhibition features works and comparisons with Lorenzo Monaco, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, as well as with great sculptors of the time such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Michelozzo and Luca della Robbia.
The exhibition will allow you to discover Beato Angelico's extraordinary ability to combine formal innovation, spiritual depth and intellectual rigor. His paintings, renowned for their rendering of light, use of perspective and expressive delicacy, mark a fundamental turning point in the transition from
 the Late Gothic to the Renaissance.

On display are paintings, drawings, sculptures and miniatures, enhanced by specially restored masterpieces, long-lost works and altarpieces reassembled for the first time in hundreds of years. Among the outstanding restorations is that of the Deposition from the Cross executed for the Strozzi Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Trinita, housed in the Museo di San Marco, with which Beato Angelico revolutionized the model of the medieval altarpiece to create a unique space with a theatrical and engaging impact.
Paintings, miniatures, drawings and sculptures compose a body of work that conveys the variety and depth of Angelico's artistic output, in an immersive and moving experience for scholars, enthusiasts and visitors.

Watch the video