The Papacy Offered to Saint Gregory the Great [?]

Fra Angelico's panel depicting the Papacy Offered to Saint Gregory the Great, painted around 1435 for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, illustrates an episode from the life of the great pope and Doctor of the Church. Gregory's reluctance to accept the papal office was a popular subject in Dominican hagiography. Fra Angelico — born Guido di Pietro, known in religion as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole — was a Dominican friar whose painting practice was inseparable from his spiritual vocation. Working primarily for his own order and for Florentine civic and private patrons, he created some of the most luminous and spiritually powerful images in the history of European art.

The narrative scene is set within an architectural interior rendered in one-point perspective, with the gathered cardinals and the reluctant Gregory arranged in a balanced composition painted in Fra Angelico's characteristic luminous colors.