Saint Michael Archangel Makes the Sea Withdraw to Leave a Passage for a Woman who Gave Birth on a Pilgrimage to Tumba, and Saint Michael Archangel and the Bull of Monte Gargano

Fra Angelico's predella panels for the Life of Saint Michael represent the artist at work within the Dominican tradition of hagiographic narrative, producing the episodic storytelling that accompanied the larger devotional image above on the altar. The double scene — the miracle at the sea and the bull of Monte Gargano — derives from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine. Fra Angelico worked at San Marco in Florence from 1436 under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, and these small narrative panels show the meticulous linear style and jewel-like colour he used even at intimate scale.

The small predella format condenses narrative: figures are simply posed against schematic landscape with gold ground receding into shallow pictorial space. Colours are clear and unmixed — lapis blues, vermilion reds, and bright greens — with fine brushwork in faces and drapery details.