Armadio degli Argenti

Fra Angelico's Armadio degli Argenti, painted around 1450 for the Museum of San Marco, is a remarkable series of thirty-five small panels that originally decorated a silver cabinet in the Santissima Annunziata. The panels depict scenes from the life of Christ in a continuous narrative cycle that represents Fra Angelico's late mastery of storytelling. 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 small-scale narratives demonstrate Fra Angelico's ability to compress complex scenes into compact formats, with each panel rendered in luminous tempera with precise architectural settings and clearly organized figure groups.