The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has raised £4.48m to prevent a rare Italian Renaissance painting from leaving the country after two centuries.
Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion was going to be sold to an overseas buyer last year, but due to the work’s value and importance to the UK, the culture secretary granted a deferral of nine months in January to keep the painting in the UK, giving the Oxford University institute time to raise the funds needed to acquire it.
The artwork will be one of the few Fra Angelico paintings in the British public collections to go on display, being used to teach Oxford University undergraduates and shown to schoolchildren.
Dr Xa Sturgis, the director of the Ashmolean, said: “I am thrilled that millions of visitors who come through our doors will now be able to enjoy this beautiful, moving and important work – the earliest surviving painting by the artist of a subject he was to return to again and again throughout his career.”
The Ashmolean plans to rehang its Italian Renaissance galleries, which have not been displayed since 2009. The painting will hang near Fra Angelico’s hinged triptych, a later work, which the museum hopes will allow visitors to appreciate how the artist’s style developed over his career.
The funding, which represents a substantial reduction in the work’s market price, came from the Ashmolean’s chair, James Lupton; David Bennett Borthwick and Molly Lowell Borthwick; major grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, and the Headley Trust; more than 50 major donors, and a successful public appeal.
Fra Angelico, who was active from 1417 and died in 1455, was a Dominican friar and one of the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance, best known in Italy today as beato angelico, or “blessed angelic one”. His paintings are characterised by their naturalistic style and distinctive colour palette of blue, pink-red and gold.
Painted in the 1420s, The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist and the Magdalen is one of his earliest works, as well as one of the few surviving small-scale pieces. Most of Fra Angelico’s paintings are large-scale frescoes or monumental altarpieces that remain in Dominican churches and convents in his native city of Florence and in the Vatican.
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Prof Jennifer Sliwka, the head of the department of western art at the Ashmolean, said: “Fra Angelico was recognised as having ‘a rare and perfect talent’ by the famous artist-biographer Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century, and his work was subsequently praised by the great Victorian artist and author John Ruskin, who described it as being ‘as near heaven as human hand or mind will ever or can ever go’.
“I am thrilled that Angelico’s Crucifixion will enter public ownership for the first time, allowing Ashmolean visitors the opportunity to experience his painterly skills and ability to evoke profound emotional and psychological states first hand.”