Angelico

An early work by the Italian early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, "The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross", is being offered with an estimate of 4 million - 6 million pounds.

You don’t have to be Roman Catholic to have your breath taken away by Fra Angelico’s gentle frescoes depicting saints in the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy, nor a Buddhist to experience the contemplative journey of enlightenment through a 16th century landscape painting by Chinese master Dong Qichang.

Eugene Baraban applies ornate Easter egg embellishments to a small wooden piece in the shape of a bomb, while Katya Bondarec collages a reproduction of Fra Angelico’s “The Annunciation” so that Mary cradles a map of Ukraine.

Even more disturbing than the violence, which derives from a strangely sweet Fra Angelico panel of saints being beheaded that Thompson saw at Paris’ Louvre Museum, is the cluster of rudimentary figures looking on passively at the left.

European paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin and other artists in the Western canon echo in his work, submerged within Modernist forms.