SIR, In the review of the recent Fra Angelico exhibition at the Palazzo dei Caffarelli, Musei Capitolini, published in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.418–19, Anne Leader comments that six drawings by the artist and his collaborators conclude the exhibition and then comments: ‘Angelico’s work as a draughtsman is poorly understood, given the few surviving works’.

In her essay in the exhibition catalogue on Fra Angelico as a draughtsman, Lorenza Melli reproduces an old black-and-white photograph of a drawing formerly in the collection of Francesco de A. Gali Fabra, Barcelona, of the dead Christ from a Depo­sition, which she describes as ‘lost’. In fact this drawing (Fig.40) was acquired in 2003 by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, with help from Mark Fisch, through Cambridge in America, and The Art Fund. It had been acquired by Pedro Succarats from Gali Fabra’s collection and was in his sale in Paris, 15th–18th July 1938, and was then bought on the advice of Kenneth Clark by Captain Norman Colville.

The drawing relates to the figure of Christ in Fra Angelico’s Deposition (Museo di S. Marco, Florence), painted for Palla Strozzi and installed in 1432 in the Strozzi chapel in the church of S. Trinita. 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.

This may explain the purpose of the drawing, which was probably executed after the altarpiece had been painted. The character of the drawing would fit well with the idea of the Devotia moderna. A later quattrocento copy of the same image is in the treasury of the Monastery of S. Francesco at Assisi (see M.G. Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto, ed.: Il Tesoro della Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi, Florence 1980, no.10, fig.45), brought to my attention by Carl Strehlke. It appears to be in its original frame and was thus evidently regarded as a substitute picture. We can conclude that the purpose of this drawing is probably the same as the Fitzwilliam’s and that it was intended for private contemplation and devotion. That explains its size and its singular subject-matter: the body of Christ with no support behind it. It is unlikely to have been a preparatory drawing for the altarpiece, but a copy of the single figure of Christ made for a private client after the painting had been installed. 

Its attribution is still unresolved. No certain drawing by Fra Angelico survives, although most critics accept as autograph the King David playing a psaltery in the British Museum and the Christ on the Cross in the Albertina, Vienna. Lionello Venturi was first to publish the Fitzwilliam’s drawing as by Fra Angelico, believing it to be preparatory to the painted Deposition.1 Degenhart and Schmitt2 were more cautious and called it ‘School of Fra Angelico’ and John Pope-Hennessy3 followed them, but they had only seen a photograph of the drawing. In a letter of 1938 to Colville, urging the drawing’s acquisition, Clark considered it ‘possibly the finest of the existing drawings by Fra Angelico’, with which one can hardly disagree. The internal modelling of the body is superb, but also of extreme delicacy, and the work is clearly superior to any surviving drawing by Angelico’s principal followers, Benozzo Gozzoli and Zanobi Strozzi.