Reading and Viewing Words in Fra Angelico’s Typological Paintings

In medieval art, there are numerous examples of pictorial programmes composed according to a system of typological opposition between scenes from the Old and the New Testaments, in which scenes from the New are seen as the typological fulfillment of prophecies from the Old. Normally, scenes from both Testaments are juxtaposed, so that the fulfillment under Christ can be seen together with the scene that prefigures it. In the works of the Florentine painter Fra Angelico, this system is softened. His series of 36 small panels from the Armadio degli argenti, now in the Museo di San Marco (Florence), is apparently a quite conventional representation of “highlights” from the Gospel story. However, the inscriptions that accompany each panel reveal a typological scheme at heart of the pictorial programme. This paper studies the compositional and expressive devices applied in Fra Angelico’s subtle rendering of well-established theological concepts. Further, the paper argues that the same devices appear in a group of paintings of the Annunciation which can be attributed to Fra Angelico or his school