Fra Angelico at the Met

Apollo, May, 2006 by Laurence B. Kanter

Traditionally, the organisers of an exhibition do not respond to a critical review; however, James Beck's Angelic, but the Devil is in the Details' (APOLLO, January 2006) is so eccentric that it cannot be passed over in silence. Some of the misrepresentations of fact in this review are egregious. Nowhere in our catalogue, for example, is it claimed that the Livorno Christ Crowned with Thorns (right) is an early work by Fra Angelico, let alone one possibly painted as early as c. 1410, when the artist was 'around fifteen to twenty years of age'. It would be mad to think so. The date assigned to it on our gallery label, c. 1438-39, is not a lapsus, as suggested by Professor Beck, nor even a correction, but exactly the same as that argued at length in Pia Palladino's catalogue entry (pp. 172-75).

It is necessary to point out the irony of being accused by Professor Beck of 'playing fast and loose' with documents and dated works for having deliberately ignored, by his account, 'the earliest document which refers to an existing work by Fra Angelico... a final accounting in March 1429... for the so-called Fiesole Altarpiece with its wonderful predella panels (Fig. 3) in London. Quite remarkably, the exhibition dates it to "around" 1419-21.' The document in question, which is fully discussed in the catalogue (p. 90), refers, as every first-year student of Fra Angelico knows, not to the Fiesole Altarpiece but to the San Pier Marlire Altarpiece in the Museo di San Marco, with its wonderful predella panels, also in London but at the Courtauld Institute, not the National Gallery. There are no known documents that refer to the Fiesole Altarpiece other than obliquely or inferentially, and these are all presented in our catalogue (pp. 64-72).

Professor Beck's predictably caustic and entirely unjustified attack on the "highly questionable condition' of the Rotterdam Madonna and Child with Two Angels should by now surprise no one familiar with the general tenor of his recent writings, but his complaint that the decorations mounted behind reading desks as an adjunct to the exhibition, reproducing details from some of Fra Angelico's monumental frescoes, were 'out of scale, out of order and without regard for chronology', is utterly baffling. It would be possible to say the same for the logic of his historical arguments, but as he himself suggests, 'the Devil is in the details'.

Laurence B. Kanter, Curator-in-Charge, Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Professor Beck replies: In the entry no. 33 of the catalogue devoted to the unpleasant Christ Crowned with Thorns, toward the end of the torturous text, we read: 'On the other hand, the confirmation of an early date for the paintings execution...' (p.174). Perhaps the author did not really mean early early, but early on the late side, or early middle, but since much of the exhibition is devoted recreating what is claimed to be a substantial early oeuvre, I took the word on face value. In addition, the catalogue entry does not give a date for this picture, which may also have led to me to jump at the word 'early', for most entries do have dates.

James Beck, Department of Art History, Columbia University, New York