Anybody who has been to Tuscany will have pleasant memories of the sunshine striking hilltop villages. But Florence, which is one of the two cities at the centre of this study is not a hilltop village, unlike Siena, Volterra, Cortona San Gimignano or Arezzo. What is important about Florence is the river Arno. The Arno answered all Florence’s need for water, it contributed to her hygiene, fish from the river helped to feed her whilst the river’s race turned the millwheels that ground the flour for the people’s bread. Equally important was the effect of the river on the Florentine economy. A plentiful supply of water was necessary for the washing, fulling and dying of cloth which was the basis of Florentine wealth. By the end of the thirteenth century the two pillars of Florentine political policy had been well-established: the pre-eminent cloth industry which promoted the establishment of branch houses of Florentine merchants all over Europe, and an alliance with the papacy which helped to promote the independence and security of the commune of the city.

In the fifteenth century the city was dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families. The constitution was republican, but there was scope for only limited participation in government. Florence could in no way be called democratic. Government rested with the ottimati, the ‘best men’ of the community. This group itself was divided up into various parties built around family alliance systems. Over the years through marriage contracts, trading partnerships and, business ventures, patterns of association were forged which lent a certain stability to communal politics. By 1429, when Fra Angelico was about 42 years old, the leading figure in Florentine politics was Cosimo De Medici, a wealthy merchant and financier who had increased his fortune through acting as the papal banker. Cosimo’s economic activity had made him one of the richest men in Europe.

The Strozzis were a large, rich and powerful family in the Florence of the 1420s. Like many aristocratic merchant families of the time, they planned a chapel where only they would have the right to be buried. Such privatised funerary and memorial arrangements were not unusual, though in combining theirs with a functioning sacristy in the monastic church of Santa Trinita, the Strozzis started a trend which was to be important in the evolution of Renaissance architecture. Because it was stripped of furnishings and pictures in the seventeenth century, the chapel-sacristy at Santa Trinita now looks bare, but in the early fifteenth century it was full of colour and religious imagery.

The head of the family, Palla Strozzi, took a leading part in the planning of the memorial chapel. He negotiated with the monks, engaged an architect, masons and stone carvers and had his deceased father entombed in a wall of the as yet uncompleted building. In a real sense it was Palla’s project His choice of artists to paint pictures for it reveals his taste. He commissioned Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist in Italy, to paint the Adoration of the Magi, and Lorenzo Monaco, the leading practitioner in Florence of the International Gothic style, to produce a Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Gentile’s work is now in the Uffizi, but Lorenzo died in 1425 leaving the Deposition unfinished. Twenty years later Fra Angelico completed it, and today it hangs in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.

Guido di Pietro, known to posterity as Fra Angelico, was born of peasant stock in Mugello, probably around 1400. He and his brother trained as illuminators and miniaturists and, when Angelico was about 21, they joined the Observant Dominican community of San Domenico in Fiesole above Florence. Professed as Brother John, Angelico’s ‘pastoral work’ while studying for the priesthood was to paint for San Domenico, Sta Maria Novella, and elsewhere. These early commissions made him famous and funded his workshop. If he was still learning priestcraft he was also still learning to paint: for his skills as an illuminator were little preparation for altarpiece design, a duty laid on his shoulders along with his Dominican scapular. So he became acquainted with the works of his contemporaries such as Masaccio, Masolino, Gentile and Sassetta.

His most important contact, however, was Cosimo De Medici, a patron not only of the arts but of the religious orders, especially the more radical mendicants. On return to power in 1434, he set about installing the Observant Dominicans in Florence, renovating an abandoned monastery for them which was to represent “the best in Christian humanism”.

The thirteenth century saw the rejuvenation of the Italian Church by the order of St. Francis. The Franciscans contributed to the new humanism that is identified with the Renaissance and expressed in the Tuscan painters of Florence (Cimabue and Giotto di Bondone) and of Siena (Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers). In the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi where Cimabue and Torriti worked in fresco, the new humanism appears in the “Legend of the St. Francis Cycle.” In this work, life-sized human figures, conveying human emotions, made their first appearance in European painting. In the frescoes of the Scrovegni chapel at Padua and in Santa Croce in Florence, Giotto evoked a whole new range of feeling and expression. His immediate followers at Florence, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, and Maso di Banco, for all their narrative invention and human intimacy, were dwarfed by his genius. But at Siena the school of Duccio di Buoninsegna developed its own more lyrical and illustrative style, with jewel-like colouring and linear grace. If Giotto gave painted figures humanity, Duccio established them in recognizable settings, Simone Martini invested them with poetry, while Ambrogio Lorenzetti set them in their complete physical environment. It was at this time that Florence and Siena produced the tentative beginnings of portraiture and of landscape in painting. The Tuscan painters reflect the Franciscan joy and delight in the goodness and beauty of the world, the Franciscan appreciation of nature as the resplendent reflection of its Creator, and the Franciscan esteem and affection for the poor and ordinary people.