Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Florentine Convent As Practiced Place: Cosimo De’Medici, Fra Angelico, And The Public Library Of San Marco, Allie Terry-Fritsch

Art History Faculty Publications

By approaching the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence as a “practiced place,” this article considers the secular users of the convent’s library as mobile spectators that necessarily navigated the cloister and dormitory and, in so doing, recovers, for the first time, their embodied experience of the architectural pathway and the frescoed decoration along the way. To begin this process, the article rediscovers the original “public” for the library at San Marco and reconstructs the pathway through the convent that this secular audience once used. By considering the practice of the place, this article considers Fra Angelico’s extensive …