Carl Brandon Strehlke: My search for the 15th Century artist Beato Angelico

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Art historian Carl Brandon Stehlke is a world expert on the great 15th Century Florentine painter Fra Angelico, and this is his dream project: a historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the artist's work at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco in Florence. The show brings together more than 140 works from 70 different lenders and reunites the sections of Angelico's great altarpieces, scattered when Napoleon closed the city's churches and convents in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, now fully restored and seen together for the first time in 200 years. Carl takes Maria Margaronis through the process of mounting such a massive exhibition from conception to grand opening. In the restorers' studios she hears how new technologies are revealing the limpid colours of paintings once thought beyond repair. And in the stillness of the San Marco convent Carl explains how Angelico's intimate, deeply humane frescos guided the friars' meditation and spiritual life, and how he fell in love with the artist's work nearly 50 years ago.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:06.6	This is the deposition altarpiece.
0:09.9	You can see, it's just been restored.
0:11.8	It's glowing.
0:12.9	The colours are glowing.
0:15.2	This very soft, sweet red and blue and gold.
0:20.3	Gold.
0:23.7	We're looking at an astonishing pinnacled altarpiece by the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico,
0:26.7	full of movement and drama,
0:28.3	but mysteriously still and intimate at the same time.
0:31.4	He had to paint Christ being taken down from the cross
0:36.0	where the Virgin is waiting, where her companions have already
0:41.8	arranged the winding cloth on her lap. And she, you know, she's in a sense of great, great grief
0:51.8	with her hands tightly clasp.
0:56.5	Welcome to Florence and the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service.
1:02.1	I'm Maria Margaronis, visiting art historian Carl Brandon Stralkie,
1:06.4	who is on a mission to bring together many of this beloved painter's greatest works,
1:10.7	scattered for centuries,
1:12.2	in a historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.
1:19.5	Carl and I are old friends.
1:22.8	He lives on the top floor of a tall 15th century building, which he calls a medieval skyscraper.
1:30.0	Hey, this is what keeps you young, Carl.
	...

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