The Coronation of the Virgin
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
No Gospel crowns her. The Coronation is a doctrine, not an episode — it grew out of the belief in her bodily Assumption and entered painting only in the twelfth century.
So Fra Angelico builds a flight of marble steps and stages an argument on them: who kneels, who stands, who is allowed near the top. The Magdalene is foremost, in red, with her jar. The painter was a Dominican, and the ranks below are his own order's case for its standing.
It stood in his convent church at Fiesole before its consecration in 1435. Napoleon took it in 1812.
Sources: Musée du Louvre, INV 314 ; MR 220 · Patricia Rubin, "Hierarchies of Vision: Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin from San Domenico, Fiesole," Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2004), 137–53 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, systematic catalogue, Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries · Yale University Art Gallery, Italian Paintings systematic catalogue, vol. 2, entry 85
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 9,358 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.