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How did Fra Angelico change Lorenzo Monaco’s unfinished Deposition into a unified altarpiece?
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Fra Angelico
Madonna of Humility, tempera on panel by Fra Angelico, c. 1440; in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Fra Angelico transformed the Deposition—which Lorenzo Monaco had originally divided into a triptych with pinnacles before his death in 1425—into a unified altarpiece by replacing the segmented structure with a vast, continuous landscape.1
He integrated the composition by setting the figures against a wide, expansive background dominated by a varicoloured hill town, which is thought to be an imaginative evocation of Cortona. By arranging the human figures in interconnected groups against this receding landscape rather than a traditional foreground stage, Angelico demonstrated his mastery of early Renaissance formalism and spatial representation.1