Fra Angelico Crucifixion Scene acquired by Ashmolean Museum

The magnificent work, which has been in the UK for about two centuries, was sold to an overseas buyer and was at risk of leaving the country.  Due to the work’s value and importance to the nation, the Reviewing Committee on the Exports of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, which is supported by the Arts Council, recommended that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport put a temporary export license stop - known as a deferral - on the work. In January 2024, the export deferral was announced, allowing the Ashmolean nine months to express interest in acquiring the work and raise the necessary funds to keep the painting in the UK.

A private treaty sale has enabled the Ashmolean to acquire the work for £4.48 million, a substantial reduction in its market price. Now acquired, the painting will go on free public display for the benefit of visitors, students, scholars, and schoolchildren in perpetuity.

Fra Angelico (active 1417; died 1455), was both a Dominican friar and one of the most celebrated artists of the Italian Renaissance and is best known in Italy today as Beato Angelico or ‘Blessed Angelic One’. His paintings are characterised by their extraordinary psychological penetration, compelling naturalism 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 Fra Angelico’s earliest works and exemplifies the power, beauty, and sensitivity for which he would later become known. Most of Fra Angelico’s paintings are large-scale frescoes or monumental altarpieces that remain in situ in the Dominican churches and convents in his native city of Florence and its surroundings and in the Vatican. This painting, in contrast, is one of the few surviving small-scale works on panel by the artist. It offers extraordinary insight into both Fra Angelico’s innovative painterly style and the development of European painting more broadly.

There are very few paintings by Fra Angelico in British public collections – a fact noted by the Reviewing Committee when considering their recommendation. Outside of London, it is only the Ashmolean that is fortunate enough to preserve a work by the master and his studio in its collection. This work, a hinged triptych that depicts the Virgin and Child with angels and a Dominican saint flanked by Saints Peter and Paul, is currently on display in the Museum’s gallery of Early Italian Art. The Crucifixion will soon hang alongside the later work, allowing visitors to appreciate both how the artist’s style developed over the course of his career and the extent to which his delicate, emotive approach was already established by the 1420s.

Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion will join the Ashmolean’s important collection of Italian Renaissance artworks that includes paintings by Paolo Uccello and Titian, and major drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo. The acquisition of The Crucifixion expands this preeminent collection further and will inspire a total rehang of the Museum’s Italian Renaissance galleries, which have not been redisplayed since 2009. The acquisition of The Crucifixion underscores the Ashmolean’s role as an important centre for the study of Italian Renaissance art.