The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

Fra Angelico or close follower
(c.1395/1400-1455)
The Dead Christ
c. 1432
Pen and brown ink, brown and
red wash, heightened with white,
on paper, 355 x 274 mm.
PD.25-2003
Bought from the Perceval Fund,
with contributions from the
National Art Collections Fund
and Mark Fisch, through
Cambridge in America.
The drawing relates to the figure of
Christ in Fra Angelico's Deposition
painted for Palla Strozzi, which was
installed in the Strozzi chapel in the
church of Sta Trinità, Florence in 1432.
At this period the Deposition was a very
unusual subject for an altarpiece in
Florence, and interest in the subject may
be related to new theories of devotion –
the so-called Devotia moderna – in
which the viewer was asked to
participate on a personal level with the
suffering of Christ. The drawing, which
was probably executed after the
altarpiece [rather than as a preparatory
study for it] was most likely intended
as an icon for private contemplation
and devotion, which would explain its
size and exceptional subject matter.
The question of attribution remains
unresolved, but the internal modelling
of the body is superb and of extreme
delicacy and the work is clearly superior
to any surviving drawing by Angelico's
principal followers, Benozzo Gozzoli and
Zanobi Strozzi. In a letter of 1938 to
Norman Colville, the former owner of
this drawing, Kenneth Clark described
it as ‘possibly the finest of the existing
drawings by Fra Angelico’.
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